New Delhi: Nine women were raped in Murthal during the Jat quota agitation last year, senior advocate and amicus curiae Anupam Gupta told the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Gupta told the HC on Thursday that the information was shared with him by Haryana Additional Chief Secretary Vijay Vardhan, who was now denying it “under pressure from Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar”. He said that investigation in the case should be transferred to the CBI.
Gupta told a division bench of Justices Ajay Kumar Mittal and Amit Rawal that Vardhan was denying the rapes as he lacked the “biological element called spine in his biological structure”, adding that the IAS officer was reprimanded by the CM for sharing the information.
He said Vardhan was told of the rapes by then Haryana Police chief KP Singh. Singh was appointed the Haryana Police Chief in April 2016 after his predecessor YP Singhal was shunted in an apparent fallout of the police failure to control the agitation.
Vardhan has denied having any such conversation with Gupta in an affidavit submitted to the court. Gupta, however, claimed that he spoke to Vardhan through senior officer Ashok Khemka.
The next date of hearing in the case will be November 6.
The Haryana government had first denied any incidents of rape during the violent quota agitation, but later admitted in the High Court of the possibility that rapes could have happened.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court, in January 2017, had observed in open court that three forms of evidence - undergarments recovered from the site, semen samples and the witnesses who saw people dragging girls out from cars and other private vehicles - directly point to the fact that the rapes happened.
The court had asked the state police's special investigation team to find the culprits. The SIT has taken over the probe in 1,105 cases of violence. A brief detail about the taking over of investigation and the method adopted to probe the cases was submitted before the HC on Thursday by Amitabh Dhillon, the SIT chief.
At least 30 people were killed and over 320 injured in the nine-day long Jat agitation for reservation in February 2016.
Comments
0 comment