Nirbhaya case: Delhi court to hear plea seeking FIR against sole witness

NEW DELHI: The father of one of the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape-and-murder case moved a

Delhi court

on Thursday, challenging an order refusing direction of an FIR against the sole eyewitness in the matter.


The application was filed by

Heera Lal Gupta

, father of Pawan Kumar Gupta, before additional sessions judge Satish Kumar Arora against an order of a magisterial court.

It has sought a direction to the Delhi police to lodge an FIR against the eyewitness, a friend of the 23-year-old victim, for allegedly giving interviews to various television news channels after charging money.

The sessions court put up the matter for hearing on January 27.

The magisterial court had dismissed a similar application on January 6.

The eyewitness was accompanying the victim in the bus when the gruesome incident took place and he had also sustained injuries.

The application cited certain recent media reports, which alleged that the witness charged money to appear on various news channels, the applicant's lawyer, A P Singh, said.

It alleged that the act of the witness affected the case by "resulting in a media trial".

"This calls for an independent investigation into the perjury that appears to have been committed by him (witness). Being the sole witness, his testimony has strongly influenced the outcome of the case, which led to the imposition of death penalty on the accused," the complaint said.

Nirbhaya is the changed name of the December 2012 gang rape-and-murder victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern who was raped and brutalised in a moving bus in south Delhi by six people.

The woman had boarded the almost empty bus in

Munirka

, along with her male friend, on her way home on December 16, 2012. After raping and brutalising the woman and beating up her friend, the assailants had thrown them out of the bus.

After receiving initial treatment in New Delhi for a few days, the victim was shifted to Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries on December 29, 2012.

(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme Court directives on cases related to sexual assault)

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