Police challenge RK Sharma’s acquittal

NEW DELHI: Just a day before the 90-day deadline for filing appeal, Delhi Police on Wednesday moved the Supreme Court challenging a Delhi High Court verdict acquitting former IPS officer R K Sharma and two others in the 1999 murder of journalist Shivani Bhatnagar.
The 80-page appeal assailed the HC’s conclusion that the police failed to produce cogent evidence to link Sharma, Bhagwan Sharma and Satya Prakash, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, to the murder.However, the HC had upheld the conviction and life term of the hitman Pradeep Sharma. In the appeal filed through advocate B V Balram Das, Delhi Police said the HC erred in acquitting Sharma and the two others despite a clear chain of evidence along with circumstantial proof to indicate their close involvement in the conspiracy to kill Shivani in her Navkunj Apartments flat in Patparganj in east Delhi on January 21, 1999.
It said the criminal conspiracy masterminded by Sharma was evident from the telephone records of the acquitted persons who allegedly planned to hire Pradeep Sharma to eliminate the journalist. Sharma’s counsel had pleaded before the HC that Delhi Police had tampered with the telephone records to implicate him in the case. At the time of the murder, Sharma was working in the Prime Minister’s Office. He had absconded immediately after his name surfaced as an accused in the case and surrendered only in September 2002.
Police sources, meanwhile, claimed that the distorted archive of Sharma’s cellphone records was not the only evidence that they have.
“One must remember that mobile technology was comparatively new at the time of the murder in the late 90s. In addition, the SIM card in question was destroyed on the day of the murder with the case getting cracked more than two years later. Hence, the archiving might have not have reached the same level of sophistication as is possible today. However, this does not mean we do not have evidence. This special leave petition might be less than 80 pages, but our final appeal is expected to run into more than a 1,000 pages,” claimed a crime branch source.
Even as the crime branch is finalizing the “para by para” analysis of the HC order acquitting Sharma at its SIT office in Rohini, prima facie, it has been decided that the prosecution will emphasize on other circumstantial evidence available such as Pradeep staying in constant touch with R K Sharma by using his neighbour Ramphal’s landline and how the co-accused were related to each other.