The Supreme Court on Monday confirmed the life sentence to ten Delhi police personnel for killing two businessmen in a broad daylight shootout at Connaught Place 14 years ago acting in a casual manner by taking them as Uttar Pradesh gangsters.
Rejecting the plea of the cops’ team leader ACP S.S. Rathi that he was not directly involved in the shootout as he was sitting in his jeep while he had asked the other team members to intercept the vehicle presumably driven by gangster Mohd Yaseen, the apex court said there was no truth in his story.
“We see absolutely no evidence that the firing had been resorted to by the seven appellants (junior cops) on orders of ACP Rathi as we have found that it was pursuant to the common intention of all the accused that the incident had happened on March 31, 1997,” a bench of Justices H.S. Bedi and C.K. Prasad said, while rejecting the appeal.
The two businessmen from Haryana, who fell victims to the spray of bullets fired by the cops were identified as Jagjit Singh and Tarunpreet Singh from Kurukshetra, Haryana, who had come to meet a city trader Pradeep Goyal at Patparganj in trans-Yamuna area.
Having failed to meet Mr Goyal at his residence, the two businessmen went to meet him in Connaught Place after contacting him on his mobile phone and it was at this stage that they were noticed by ACP Rathi’s team as the face of one of them resembled to Yaseen. The cops were in pursuit of Yaseen as he had committed several crimes in the capital during 1996-97.
Earlier, the Delhi HC had rejected the appeals of the convicted policemen on September 18, 2009 while upholding the trial court order awarding them life sentence in a judgment passed on October 24, 2007 after a ten years’ long trial proceedings.
Besides Rathi, the other convicts include 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.