New Delhi: A Delhi court on Saturday reserved its order on the sentencing of 17 Uttarakhand police personnel convicted in the fake encounter killing of an MBA graduate with CBI demanding death for seven of them.
Special CBI Judge JPS Malik will pronounce the order on June 09 in the case in which all the 18 accused policemen were convicted yesterday in the July 03, 2009 fake encounter in which 22-year-old Ranbir Singh of Ghaziabad was killed in a jungle near Dehradun.
One of the accused was allowed to walk free from jail as he has already served the period of sentence for a lesser offence during the pendency of the trial.
Senior Public Prosecutor Brajesh Kumar Shukla, appearing for CBI, demanded death sentence for seven convicted under the offence of Section 302 (murder) of IPC saying that the police personnel behaved in a "predatory manner", which falls under the act of "rarest of rare".
"They (police) were the protectors of law but they behaved in a predatory manner. They should have given protection to the victim, but they killed him in a fake encounter... Pandemonium can`t be allowed to be prevailed.”
"In a case where fake encounter is proved, the situation is rarest of rare and death penalty should be awarded," Shukla said, adding that the court should give such sentence so that "no public person in future can even think of doing such crimes".
"The circumstances under which the victim was killed deserves nothing less then death penalty," the prosecution said, who cited numerous quotes from Mahabharat, Bible and also reads lines of Shakespeare.
The court had yesterday held seven of the 18 policeman, including six sub-inspectors Santosh Kumar Jaiswal, Gopal Dutt Bhatt (SHO), Rajesh Bisht, Neeraj Kumar, Nitin Kumar Chauhan, Chander Mohan Singh Rawat and constable Ajit Singh, guilty of killing of the victim, who had gone to Dehradun to take up a job in July 2009.
