Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Rajiv Gandhi case: SC unhappy at CBI report on larger conspiracy

15/01/2020 , Legal Correspondent , NEW DELHI

 

The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed its unhappiness about the CBI’s status report on the probe into the larger conspiracy behind the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu in 1991.

Instead of revealing the progress made to unearth the truth, the report filed in the Supreme Court by the investigating agency merely parroted its past reports over the years. “We are not happy with the report,” a Bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and Hemant Gupta said.

The court called for the presence of a senior law officer, an Additional Solicitor General, to appear, and kept the case on hold to be taken up later.

After half-an-hour, the case came up again. This time, Justice Rao expressed the court’s dissatisfaction without mincing words.

“There is no difference between this report and the ones filed before. Everything said is quite the same as before... going to Bangkok or something... What we want to know is what progress has been made [in the investigation] in the past two years at least,” Justice Rao observed.

Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for Rajiv Gandhi assassination convict A.G. Perarivalan, submitted that the CBI’s Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA), probing the larger conspiracy behind the killing, was yet to conclude its investigation pertaining to the origin and make of the bomb.

The Bench allowed Perarivalan’s lawyers to peruse the CBI report in the courtroom. The report was filed in a sealed cover. The court finally ordered the CBI to file a fresh report detailing the work done. The case is listed on January 28.

Perarivalan, who is in his mid-forties now, has spent about a quarter of a century inside jail serving life imprisonment. He was 19 at the time of his arrest. Perarivalan has sought an order from the court to stay his life sentence till the MDMA probe is completed. He has argued that the CBI has still not been able to question Nixon alias Suren, one among the 21 suspects the MDMA is waiting to investigate, who allegedly knows about the making of the bomb. He contended that his role in the alleged crime taken to the maximum would be that of supplying two nine-volt batteries without the knowledge of what it was going to be used for.

No comments:

Post a Comment

NEWS TODAY 21.12.2024