Five years after seven persons were arrested by Delhi police on charges of involvement in terror activities after an encou-nter, a city court, while acquitting them has blasted the police for scripting an encounter sitting in the office. It has directed the Delhi police commissioner to conduct an inquiry against four officials of sub-inspector
rank, including a gallantry medal-winning officer Ravinder Tyagi, for abuse of power and to submit a report in three months. Incidentally, the name of the S-I Tyagi also figured in allegedly falsely implicating two persons as Al-Badr militants.
In a recent order, additional sessions judge Virender Bhat, acquitted the accused arrested in July 2005 saying that the officers had acted with an intention to advance their self-interests and have brought shame and disrepute to the force. It said that such officers should be identified and be taken to task. Apart from Tyagi, the other police officers are S-Is Nirakar, Charan Singh and Mahender Kumar.
The court said that the prosecution story of the arrest of the four following exchange of fire on Delhi-Gurgaon road on July 1-2, 2005 night was fake. The prosecution has not been able to produce any evidence of their links with terrorists, it said. There was no attempt to trace the source of the arms and ammunition and the fake currency recovered in the operation as claimed by the police.
As per prosecution, Saqib Rehman, Nazir Ahmed Sofi, Haji Ghulam Moinuddin Dar and Bashir Ahmed were arrested when they tried to flee on being were asked to stop. The police said that it retaliated and arrested the accused when they opened fire. The police had claimed to have recovered an Army combat uniform, `50,000 worth fake currency and a sketch of Palam Air Force station. Subsequently, three more men — Abdul Qayoom Khan, Birender Kumar Singh and Abdul Majid Bhat — were arrested and the police claimed to have recovered AK-47 assault rifles, fake currency and ammunition from them.
While the accused claimed innocence, Moinuddin Dar revealed that he was actually involved in anti-militancy operations in the Kashmir Valley and was responsible for surrender of many militants.
The court said that as the prosecution failed to establish any of the allegations, the claims made by the accused gains credence.
Incidentally, S-I Tyagi, who had won a gallantry medal for an encounter in Nizamuddin in 2006, was also named by the CBI for implicating two persons, Mohammad Ali Qamar and Irshad Ali as militants of Al-Badr in 2006. He was also part of the team that carried out the Batla House encounter on September 19, 2008, a week after the Delhi serial blasts. Two militants were killed in the encounter, while inspector Mohan Chand Sharma of the special cell was shot dead.