E-Paper
Police probe in a Delhi riots case a ‘colossal waste of taxpayer’s money’: Court observes
Additional sessions judge Vinod Yadav said the case was a colossal wastage of the hard-earned money of taxpayers as the investigating agency showed no intent to probe the matter.
A Delhi court on Thursday discharged three people in a vandalism case related to the February 2020 communal riots in north-east Delhi, saying it seems the police made no real effort to trace eye witnesses or the real accused persons and solved it “merely by filing the charge sheet”.
Additional sessions judge Vinod Yadav, while dropping the charges against Shah Alam (26), Rashid Saifi (23) and Shadab (26) in connection with a case of loot and vandalism at a shop in Chand Bagh during the riots on February 25, said the “lack of supervision by the superior officers clearly depicts that the investigating agency has merely tried to pull the wool over the court’s eyes and nothing else”.
The judge said the case was a colossal wastage of the hard-earned money of taxpayers as the investigating agency showed no intent to probe the matter. He said the police’s failure to conduct proper investigation will “torment the sentinels of democracy when the history will look back at the worst communal riots since partition in Delhi”.
The court said the three accused were neither specifically named in the FIR, nor any specific role was assigned to them in the matter. It said the complainant, Harpreet Singh Anand, also did not specifically name or identify any of the accused persons either in his two written complaints registered on February 27 and March 1, 2020, or in his statement to the police that was recorded on March 3, 2020.
“In my opinion, he has rightly done so, because when he was not present at the spot on the date and time of incident, therefore, there was no question of him having witnessed the incident,” the court said.
The court noted that beat constable Gyan Singh never bothered to report about the incident/accused persons at Dayalpur police station, and it was only during the course of recording of his statement under Section 161 CrPC by the investigating officer on March 3, 2020 that for the first time he named the three accused in the matter.
This, the court said, seems to give the impression that the constable was “planted” just to solve the case. “This silence and delay on the part of constable Gyan Singh is not only fatal to the case of investigating agency, but it also gives an impression that he has been planted or introduced to solve the case in hand,” the judge said. Terming it an “open and shut case”, judge Yadav slammed the police probe as “callous and indolent”.
A senior officer who asked not to be named said charges were framed against the accused in 32 cases and they were discharged in only one among them. “There are 32 cases in which charges were framed by the courts against the arrested persons. Framing of charges in more than 20 of the 32 cases were done by the same court that today discharged three persons in the Dayalpur police station’s case,” the officer said.
