The Hindu : Front Page : Ten Delhi policemen held guilty in CP shooting case

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Wednesday, Oct 17, 2007
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Ten Delhi policemen held guilty in CP shooting case

Staff Reporter

Two innocent young businessmen were killed in the bizarre incident in broad daylight in the heart of the Capital ten years ago

— PHOTO: R. V. MOORTHY

DAY OF JUDGMENT: Dismissed Assistant Commissioner of Police S. S. Rathi in police custody at the Patiala House courts in New Delhi on Tuesday.

NEW DELHI: A court here on Tuesday held dismissed Assistant Commissioner of Police S. S. Rathi guilty along with nine other Delhi policemen who were involved in the infamous Connaught Place shooting case in which two businessmen were killed and another injured in a botched-up trail of an alleged gangster ten years ago.

Holding them guilty of criminal conspiracy and murder, Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Kumar said the quantum of sentence would be pronounced on October 24. Soon after the order, all the accused were taken into custody.

Apart from ACP Rathi, the others convicted are Inspector Anil Kumar, Sub-Inspector Ashok Rana, head constables Shiv Kumar, Tejpal Singh and Mahavir Singh and constables Sumer Singh, Subhash Chand, Sunil Kumar and Kothari Ram.

While the then Delhi Police Commissioner Nikhil Kumar had said that the bizarre incident was a “bona fide case of mistaken identity”, the court categorically said the circumstances of the case proved beyond doubt that the accused had conspired to kill alleged gangster Mohammad Yaseen even if he was unarmed.

“Therefore, they were ready with a weapon and with two empty cartridges to plant the same so as to show that first the occupant of the car had fired,” the court said.

On March 31, 1997, a team of the Delhi Police Crime Branch Inter-State Cell led by ACP Rathi was following a car in which Yaseen was supposed to be moving towards Delhi. The police team cornered the car near Statesman House in Connaught Place and rained bullets on it killing two persons who were in the car.

The police immediately claimed that they had killed a gangster in an encounter, only to realise that they had killed two innocent businessmen, Pradeep Goel and Jagjit Singh. A third person, Tarun Preet Singh, son of a business associate of the two victims, was injured in the shooting.

On realising that two innocent persons had been killed, the police claimed that the occupants of the car had opened fire first and that they had retaliated in “self-defence”.

They also claimed that a pistol and nearly half-a-dozen cartridges had been recovered from the car.

A forensic examination of the said pistol also purportedly “confirmed”, according to the police, that it was the same firearm that was used against the policemen and a report in this regard was lodged at the Connaught Place police station by one of the accused, Inspector Anil.

However, after the Central Bureau of Investigation took up the investigation of the case following a huge public hue and cry and anguished protests by the families of the innocent shooting victims, the pistol was again forensically examined and it was then found that it had not been used at all for months.

The court has convicted all the accused under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 193 (punishment for fabricating false evidence), read with 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

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