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Goa: CBI files chargesheet in Sonali Phogat murder case
The CBI has charged Sonali Phogat’s manager Sudhir Sangvan and his assistant Sukhwinder Singh of murder with common intention
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a chargesheet in the death of actor and Haryana Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, Sonali Phogat, charging her manager Sudhir Sangvan and his assistant Sukhwinder Singh of murder with common intention.
According to the CBI chargesheet, Sudhir P Sangvan and Sukhwinder Singh have been charged under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (murder) read with Section 34 (common intention) and 36 [effect (in this case death) caused partly by act and partly by omission].
“The chargesheet was filed on Monday evening before the Judicial Magistrate at Mapusa in North Goa by the CBI, New Delhi. The matter has been posted for hearing on December 5,” said an official of the district court who did not wish to be named.
The CBI took over the probe from the Goa police in early September after the state government acceded to demands from her family who wrote to the Union government seeking that the case be transferred to the federal investigation agency.
The BJP leader was brought dead to the St Anthony’s Hospital at Anjuna in the wee hours of August 23 after she spent the previous night at Curlies’ beach shack, a beachfront nightclub, where she was allegedly drugged with methamphetamine (MDMA) by Sudhir Sangwan and Sukhwinder, the two persons who accompanied her to the club.
While the case was initially registered as an unnatural death and was initially reported as a heart attack, it was changed to murder after the post mortem report revealed several blunt force injuries all over her body. A subsequent investigation also revealed that Sangwan had laced Phogat’s drink with MDMA causing her to be visibly unstable and after spending nearly two hours in the toilet of the club, where she was vomiting continuously, she was seen staggering out of the club at around 4.30am.
The duo was arrested the following day and are currently in judicial custody.
The CBI team spent time in the state visiting the Grand Leoney Resort, where Phogat and her two associates were staying, as well as the Curlies night club, where Phogat was last seen partying, in an effort to recreate the scene as part of the investigation.
The Goa police that initially investigated the case had arrested five people -- Sudhir Sangvan and Sukhwinder Singh, Phogat’s manager and his associate respectively, who were booked for murder through forcibly administering methamphetamine to her on the night she died, and three others -- Edwin Nunes, the owner of the Curlies night club, where she spent her final hours; Dattaprasad Gaonkar, a bell boy at the Grand Leoney Resort where Phogat and her team were staying, who is accused of supplying the methamphetamine to Sangwan and Singh; and Rama Mandrekar, from whom Gaonkar procured the amphetamine, who were booked in a separate FIR under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
Nunes, Gaonkar and Mandrekar are out on bail.
