The Rouse Avenue court in the national capital, while hearing cases against MPs and MLAs on Wednesday, sought a report from the Delhi State Legal Services Authority (DLSA) on loss and compensation to the victims, who are police personnel, in connection with the February 2015 matter of rioting in Delhi’s Burari police station.
In the matter, the court has convicted two Aam Aadmi Party MLAs, namely Akhilesh Pati Tripathi and Sanjiv Jha, along with 15 others, of rioting and causing hurt to policemen in a 7-year-old case. The Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Vaibhav Mehta adjourned the arguments on the sentence to convicts after accepting their affidavits mentioning their income and property.
The court will hear the matter on October 15 on the point of the sentence. Meanwhile, the DLSA will submit its report on the assessment of the loss to the victims with the purpose of compensating them. The court will then decide the amount of compensation. The special court has recently convicted 17 accused people and acquitted another 10 in the matter. The acquitted persons submitted their bail bonds in court on Wednesday.
“The court is of the view that the prosecution has been able to establish that both the accused persons, namely Sanjiv Jha and Akhilesh Pati Tripathi, were present at the spot when the crowd turned violent and, in fact, had played a major role in provoking and instigating the crowd,” the court said in its 149-page judgement passed on September 7.
The court had convicted the accused persons of rioting, obstructing public servants discharging duty and unlawful assembly. However, it acquitted them of the offences of criminal intimidation and damaging public property.
The court noted that the prosecution witnesses in their testimonies were “consistent” and stated that both of the MLAs were present at the place and that they were not only “active participants but, in fact, were leading the crowd.” The court further observed, “Besides, the two MLAs also provoked the mob as a part of a ‘common object of the unlawful assembly’ in order to ‘teach police officials a lesson’ and to overawe the police by force.”
The court had convicted the two MLAs and other accused, namely, Balram Jha, Shyam Gopal Gupta, Kishore Kumar, Lalit Mishra, Jagdish Chandra Joshi, Narender Singh Rawat, Neeraj Pathak, Raju Malik, Ashok Kumar, Ravi Prakash Jha, Ismail Islam, Manoj Kumar, Vijay Pratap Singh, Heera Devi, and Yashwant.
The case pertains to an incident that occurred on the night of February 20, 2015, at Burari police station during which the property was damaged and police personnel were also beaten.