New police cell to look into ‘93 riots

Mumbai police have set up a special cell that will report on the exact position of 894 cases for which chargesheets had been already filed, reports Debhasish Panigrahi.

A Fornight after HT highlighted the justice denied to victims of the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai, the city’s police commissioner announced that he had begun a massive exercise to establish the status of the more than two thousand cases that the police had registered during and after the unrest.

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He has set up a special cell that will report on the exact position of 894 cases for which the police had already filed chargesheets, DN Jadhav said on Friday, but did not set a deadline. This cell will be headed by a senior police officer. Jadhav said the police would examine whether any of the remaining 1,375 cases, which were closed because of a lack of evidence, could be re-opened. “The situation was different then. Maintenance of law and order was the police’s main task, over investigating crime,” he told a press conference. “Evidence was not forthcoming then.”

Public demands that the state government implement the report of the Srikrishna Commission, which was set up to probe the riots, have become increasingly vociferous over the past weeks, with the conclusion of the bomb blasts trial, which ended in 100 convictions, including 12 death sentences. Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has written a letter to Congress Sonia Gandhi, outlining steps that his government has taken to implement the riot panel’s recommendations.
(With inputs from Dharmendra Jore and Sanjeev Shivadekar)