BAREILLY: A local court in Bareilly has sentenced a truck driver to life in prison for deliberately running over a police constable on duty in 2018, reports Kanwardeep Singh.
During the trial, the court found that the accused had a past grudge against cops and so he ran over one of them, said the additional district govt counsel (ADGC), Santosh Kumar Srivastava.
On March 9 that year, police constable Dharmendra Kumar, along with his brother-in-law Amit Pratap Singh, was on a bike when they were hit by a speeding truck. Singh fell on the road, but Kumar got stuck between the truck's rear wheel and the bike's front wheel. However, instead of stopping, the trucker sped away and crushed Kumar to death.
Probe revealed that the truck driver, Rohit Kumar (then 24), was inebriated at the time of the incident. A chargesheet was filed under IPC section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) against the driver in July 2018. Kumar had got married just eight months before the incident.
ADGC Srivastava said, "Taking the evidence into consideration, the judge sent the convict to life imprisonment along with a fine ofRs 50,000." The judge also addressed some of the issues faced by cops who "spend most of their time on the road performing their duties without adequate facilities", the ADGC added. He recommended action against "transporters who hire less-skilled drivers to save money."