New Delhi: Former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) councillor Tahir Hussain was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday in connection with the murder of Intelligence Bureau (IB) staffer Ankit Sharma during the 2020 North East Delhi riots.
Sharma, 26, went missing near the Chand Bagh Pulia on 25 February that year. His body was found the next day dumped in a drain. A mob had dragged Sharma into Hussain’s house, where he was brutally stabbed.
Judge Praveen Singh of the Karkardooma Court refused the Delhi Police’s plea to sentence Hussain and four others to death.
On 13 July, the court pronounced the verdict convicting Hussain, Javed, Anas, Nazim and Kasim for kidnapping with intent to confine and murder of Sharma.
Hussain’s counsel told the court that the death sentence is reserved for the rarest of rare cases and cannot be given in every murder case.
Sharma was stabbed 12 times and sustained 51 injuries in total, according to his post-mortem report. At that time, various news channels, publications and politicians claimed that Sharma was stabbed more than 400 times and his intestine pulled out.
Coming more than six years after the Delhi riots erupted amid protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), this is the first conviction for murder in the cases arising out of the violence that killed 53 people.
The court held that the prosecution proved its case beyond reasonable doubt against Hussain under Sections 302 (murder), 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting while armed with a deadly weapon), 365 (kidnapping or abduction with intent to wrongfully confine), 153A (promoting enmity between different groups) and 188 (disobedience to an order promulgated by a public servant), all read with Section 149 (offence committed in prosecution of the common object of an unlawful assembly) of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The AAP had suspended Hussain following the registration of a First Information Report (FIR) against him. Subsequently, the Delhi Police Crime Branch arrested him in March 2020.
Sharma’s family had accused Hussain of instigating the mob and getting him killed. Hussain denied the allegation, claiming that he himself was a victim of the riots and the mob had broken into his office.
(Edited by Tony Rai)