Manas Dasgupta
Ahmedabad, June 20
Former Gujarat-cadre IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who had always been at loggerheads with Narendra Modi when he was the Chief Minister, was today sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of murder in a 29-year-old case of custodial death of a BJP activist.
Along with Bhatt, who then was the Additional DSP, Jamnagar, the Jamnagar District and Sessions Court judge, DM Vyas, sentenced a constable under Bhatt, Pravinsinh Jhala, to life imprisonment and two other constables to three years’ imprisonment each for aiding and abetting Bhatt in torturing Prabhudas Vaishnani, which allegedly led to his death after his release.
According to the proceedings of the case, the police had detained Prabhudas and a few others out of 133 persons against whom cases were filed for alleged rioting and other offences during one of the numerous bandh calls given in Jam-Jodhpur town by the BJP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad in protest against the arrest in Bihar of BJP veteran leader LK Advani in 1990.
Prabhudas was allegedly roughed up by Bhatt and other policemen. He was released a day later but had to be hospitalised and died a few days later. The hearing in the case had begun only in 2016.
The verdict was delivered today after the Supreme Court last week rejected Bhatt’s plea for fresh examination of all the witnesses. The Gujarat High Court too had earlier rejected his plea that he was being wrongly framed and that Prabhudas died due to kidney ailments.
Bhatt is already in jail undergoing sentence in another 25-year-old case when he was SP of Banaskantha district. He is currently lodged in Palanpur sub-jail for wrongly framing a Pali (Rajasthan) lawyer in a case of possessing narcotics.
The former IPS officer had been in the news since filing an affidavit in the Supreme Court claiming that he had “personally heard” Modi issuing “instructions” to the then Gujarat DGP to ask the policemen to “allow Hindus to take revenge for the Godhra train carnage on the Muslims” for three days.
However, a Special Investigation Team headed by former CBI director RK Raghavan, constituted at the behest of the Supreme Court then, had exonerated Modi of all the charges levelled by Bhatt.
Bhatt was first suspended in 2011 and finally sacked in 2015 from the IPS cadre for dereliction of duty and remaining absent without permission.
from The Tribune http://bit.ly/2L38xBr
via Today’s News Headlines
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