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CP shootout: ACP Rathi, nine cops convicted
Legal Correspondent

Suspended assistant commissioner of Delhi police S.S. Rathi comes out of the court after his conviction in New Delhi on Tuesday. — Tribune photo by Mukesh Aggarwal

New Delhi, October 16
After a 10-year-long trial in the infamous shootout of two Haryana businessmen in the broad daylight in Capital’s busy up market Connaught Place, a city court today convicted Delhi Police ACP S.S. Rathi and trigger-happy nine policemen of his team of murder of the businessman not even remotely connected to crime world.

The Kurukshetra-based business partners Jagjit Singh and Pradeep Goyal, who were on a trip to the Capital along with a kin of the former, faced a rain of bullets in front of the Statesman House on March 31, 1997, when Rathi’s team intercepted their car.

Rathi and the other cops - inspector Anil Kumar, sub-inspector Ashok Rana, head constables Shiv Kumar, Tejpal Singh, Mahvir Singh and constables Sumer Singh, Subhash Chand, Sunil Kumar and Kothari Ram - had been placed under suspension soon after their arrest.

“All charges against you stand proved,” additional sessions judge Vinod Kumar pronouncing the judgement told the accused, who stood silently in the jam packed court room.

The cops, who were in hot pursuit of Uttar Pradesh gangster Mohammad Yaseen in connection with over a dozen murder in the Capital, even did not think for a moment to verify the identity of the two businessmen. A boy, Tarun Preet Singh, a kin of Jagjit Singh who was injured in the shootout, was lucky to survive and proved to be a crucial eyewitness.

While pronouncing Rathi, a President’s award winner, and the nine men of his team guilty of murder, attempt to murder, destruction of evidence and trying to place false evidence before the court, the judge posted the order on sentence for October 24.

The court also ordered initiation of criminal proceedings against Central Forensic Laboratory’s ballistic expert Roop Singh for submitting a false report on the bullets and weapon purportedly recovered from their car.

Roop Singh’s role was also under cloud in the high profile Jessica Lal murder case for giving a report on alleged two bullets theory and the Delhi High Court had ordered investigation in it.

Judge Kumar was of the view that the CBI, which investigated the case, was able to establish beyond doubt that Rathi’s team had acted in a highhanded manner to kill the innocent persons.

The CBI had said the cops had planted a 7.65 mm pistol in the car of the businessmen with seven live cartridges to make a case that they had fired upon one the constables, when their vehicle was encircled.

According to the CBI, inspector Anil Kumar and two other policemen had followed the Maruti Esteem of the two businessmen from the Shakarpur area in east Delhi and informed Rathi on wireless that Mohammad Yaseen was going towards the Minot Bridge in Connaught Place and when their vehicle stopped at a traffic intersection near Statesman, they rained bullets on it.