Jammu court orders ‘torture’ FIR against SIT that probed Kathua rape & murder case

The court order came on a plea filed by three men who are friends of Vishal Jangotra, the lone accused acquitted in the Kathua rape & murder case.

The Kathua rape and murder case had become a national issue, with protests held against the perpetrators in New Delhi | Wikimedia Commons

New Delhi: A Jammu court Tuesday ordered the registration of an FIR against members of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which investigated the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district, for alleged torture.

Jammu’s senior superintendent of police has been asked to register the FIR and submit a compliance report by 7 November.

The order comes about four months after a court in Pathankot (Punjab), where the trial of the accused had been shifted on the orders of the Supreme Court, awarded life sentence to three accused and five years’ imprisonment to three others for raping and then murdering the girl in January 2018.

The SIT had been ordered to probe the gruesome case by the Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP-BJP coalition government after it hit national headlines. The SIT comprised four Jammu Crime Branch officers — then-SSP R.K. Jalla, Additional SP Peerzada Naveed, DSPs Shetambari Sharma and Nassir Hussain, and two others.

The petition

The court ordered the FIR while hearing a petition filed by advocate Ankur Sharma on behalf of Sachin Sharma, Neeraj Sharma and Sahil Sharma — friends of Vishal Jangotra, the lone accused who was acquitted by the Pathankot court.

In their plea, the trio accused the SIT of torturing Jangotra, as well as themselves, to allegedly extract false testimony out of them against him. They approached the court after their written request to the SHO of a police station in Jammu did not yield any result.

Jangotra had been acquitted after he told the court that he couldn’t have been involved in the crime since he was hundreds of kilometres away in Muzaffarnagar when the incident took place.

The crime had led to communal tension in the region and sharp division between the PDP and the BJP, with BJP ministers accusing then-CM Mehbooba Mufti of trying to use the incident for political profit.

The case

The rape and murder of the girl in January 2018 at Rasana village near Kathua hit national headlines after two BJP leaders, Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga, both ministers in the PDP-BJP government, came out in open support of the accused, as did some BJP MLAs.

A Right-wing organisation, the Hindu Ekta Manch, which had the support of the local BJP leaders, as well as lawyers came together to demand that the case be handed over to the CBI since the police was allegedly “unfair and biased”.

The SIT arrested Sanji Ram, Deepak Khajuria, Surender Verma, Tilak Raj, Anand Dutta and Parvesh Kumar as well as Jangotra and a juvenile for their alleged role in the crime. The trial was shifted from Kathua to Pathankot by the Supreme Court after lawyers in Kathua prevented Crime Branch officials from filing a charge sheet in the case.