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Delhi high court seeks Sengar, CBI responses on Unnao victim’s plea for evidence
The HC directed to file responses to the survivor’s application seeking permission to provide additional evidence by examining two officials from the school she first attended to certify her age as per school records and to place her date-of-birth certificate on record.
The Delhi High Court on Thursday directed Unnao rape convict and expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar, and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), to file their responses to the survivor’s application seeking permission to provide additional evidence by examining two officials from the school she first attended to certify her age as per school records and to place her date-of-birth certificate on record.
A bench comprising Justice Prathiba M Singh and Justice Madhu Jain sought their responses and fixed February 25 as the next date of hearing on the survivor’s application seeking permission to further examine two witnesses from Akhbar Bahadur Singh (ABS) Public School, Uttar Pradesh, where she studied, including its principal Arun Kumar Singh and assistant teacher Virender Singh.
The application was preferred in Sengar’s appeal against the trial court’s December 2019 order convicting him for raping a girl (then a minor) in Unnao and sentencing him to imprisonment for the remainder of his life.
The high court bench of justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar suspended on December 23, Sengar’s life sentence during the pendency of his appeal, concluding that he had already served seven years and five months in prison.
The court, in its ruling, held that Sengar was convicted under Section 5 (C) (aggravated penetrative sexual assault by a public servant) of the Pocso Act, but an elected representative did not fit the definition of a “public servant” under Section 21 of the IPC.
On December 29, the Supreme Court, however, stayed the high court’s order, saying that substantial questions of law had arisen in the matter that required consideration.
In her application before the Delhi High Court, argued by advocate Mahmood Pracha and Sanwar Chaudhary, the survivor alleged that Sengar influenced the investigation to prevent the investigating officer (IO) from properly determining her age by obtaining the relevant records from Akhbar Bahadur Singh Public School in Unnao.
She contended that, at Sengar’s behest, the investigating officer instead examined one of his associates, later produced as a defence witness, who falsely claimed that she had studied at a government school in Khandesarai.
The former BJP leader is also serving a 10-year jail term in connection with the custodial death of the rape survivor’s father, who died on April 9, 2018.
