New Delhi, February 6: The Centre on Monday told the Supreme Court that ex-IPS officer Rajdeep Singh had refused to be part of a new SIT headed by former Delhi High Court judge SN Dhingra that will further investigate 186 cases related to the 1984 anti-Sikh riot cases in Delhi.
Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand told a three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra that former Indian Police Bureau Director General of Police NR Wasan would replace Rajdeep Singh in the new Special Investigation Team. Serving IPS officer Abhishek Dular is the third member of the SIT.
The Bench — which had on January 11 appointed the new SIT — adjourned the matter for a week.
Justice Dhingra was a trial judge when punishments were handed out in 1990s to the accused of the Trilokpuri massacre of 1984. Kishori Lal, dubbed as the ‘butcher of Trilokpuri’, was among those sentenced by him.
Almost 3,000 people were killed, most of them in Delhi, in the anti-Sikh riots that broke out following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984.
While directing the government to provide all logistic and secretarial support to the SIT, the Bench had asked it to submit its first status report in two months.
Last month, the Bench had noted that the previous SIT had not carried out further probe into these 186 cases in which closure reports were filed.
The top court had taken the decision after perusing the report of a two-judge supervisory panel which scrutinised 241 cases related to the riots in Delhi closed by an earlier SIT formed by the NDA government for re-investigation.
Submitted on December 6, the report of the supervisory committee comprising Justice JM Panchal and Justice KSP Radhakrishnan was perused by the court.
The court had already made it clear that it would not reopen cases in which accused had been acquitted.
It had assigned the task of examining the said 241 cases closed by SIT to the supervisory committee which was to make recommendations as to whether the cases were rightly closed or not.
The court had earlier said if there was any material in the report to show that a particular case had been wrongly closed, it was open to order prosecution in such a case.
More than two years after the Narendra Modi government set up the SIT to re-investigate serious anti-Sikh riots cases of 1984 that had been closed, it has managed to file chargesheets only in very small number of cases taken up for further probe.
News Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com
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