The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday, 22 December, suspended the sentence and granted bail to a Jammu and Kashmir Police sub-inspector (SI) who had been convicted for destroying evidence in the 2018 Kathua rape case, according to a report by Bar and Bench.
SI Anand Dutta was convicted for allegedly taking a bribe worth Rs 4 lakh from Sanji Ram for sabotaging the evidence involved in the Kathua rape case in 2018.
In June 2019, a sessions court in Pathankot, Punjab sentenced Dutta to five years’ imprisonment under Section 201 of the Ranbir Penal Code (RPC) read with Section 34 and 120-B of the RPC.
The court had sentenced three others convicted in the case – Sanji Ram, Deepak Khajuria, and Parvesh Kumar – to life imprisonment. Sanji Ram, the prime accused in the case, was the caretaker of the temple.
However, on Monday, 20 December a bench of Justices Tejinder Singh Dhindsa and Vinod S Bhardwaj suspended Dutta’s sentence for the rest of his jail term and granted him bail.
Dutta had challenged the order in the high court and claimed that he was being falsely implicated in the case. He requested suspension of the sentence during the pendency of his appeal.
His lawyer Bipan Ghai said all the charges levied against Dutta were false since he was not the station house officer (SHO) of the police station where the rape complaint was filed.
Other convicts, head constable Tilak Raj and special police officer Surender Verma, were also sentenced to five years of jail.
In January 2018, an eight-year-old girl belonging to the Bakarwal community – a Muslim nomadic tribe – was drugged, raped, and murdered inside a temple. Her body was recovered from Kathua’s Rasana village.