Court raises doubts over police’s role

Calling it a trial hijacked by the ‘rich and influential,’ the session court in its judgment highlighted ‘deliberate’ discrepancies in the police investigation into the BMW case, reports Naziya Alvi.

Calling it a trial hijacked by the ‘rich and influential,’ the session court in its judgment highlighted ‘deliberate’ discrepancies in the police investigation into the BMW case.

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“It’s common for the police to make mistakes during investigations, but this case was a high profile case and closely monitored by senior police officers. Therefore, such level of inefficiency is not incidental, rather, to my mind, the same appears to be deliberate,” said Additional Session Judge Vinod Kumar.

The court further said that it was not only a case of collusion between the defence and the prosecution but at times even the police had worked in favour of the accused.

“This is simply not a case of hobnobbing between the defence counsel and the prosecution but also, at some stage in the background, the investigating officer has been influenced and deliberately indulges in such perfunctory investigation that it causes serious prejudice to the prosecution,” the judge said.

Highlighting one such flaw, the judge said, “I would not refrain from pointing out that one Additional Public Prosecutor checked the whole chargesheet and raised serious objections in the investigation. It appears that he saw through the game. I am not reproducing those objections.”

Following this, the police was forced to interrogate Sonali Nanda but it was later concealed in the main chargesheet. The police was also constrained to record further statements of the police officials who had seen the accused, Rajeev Gupta, Shyam Singh and Bhola Nath, washing the car.