"Instigated mob to teach cops lesson": Delhi court holds AAP MLAs guilty of rioting, attacking policemen

Two Aam Aadmi Party (APP) lawmakers and 15 others are staring at jail terms after a Special Court in Delhi, dealing with cases of MPs and MLAs, held them guilty of being part of an assembly, rioting and causing hurt to police personnel at a police station seven years ago..On September 7, Rouse Avenue Court’s Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Vaibhav Mehta convicted MLAs Akhilesh Pati Tripathi, Sanjeev Jha and other accused person after concluding that they sloganeered and instigated a mob that had attacked the police personnel.“This court is of the view that the prosecution has been able to establish that both the accused persons namely Sanjeev 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,” highlighted the 149-page judgment..The incident took place on the night of February 20, 2015, when a mob purportedly attacked the police personnel at Burari police station and damaged property. The issue arose after the mob demanded the custody of two men — allegedly to beat them up — arrested and brought to the police station.The police alleged that they had to tried to pacify the crowd but the MLAs joined the mob and attacked them and resorted to stone pelting.While the prosecution examined 24 witnesses to buttress its arguments saying the statements were consistent, the defence relied on 14 witnesses to prove innocence while pointing out “serious inconsistencies” in the testimonies of prosecution witnesses..The counsel for accused persons argued that they were not provoking/instigating the mob but had gone to police station to defuse the situation and pacify the crowd.The Court underlined that the prosecution witnesses in their statements were “consistent” on the point of presence of the two legislators at the place of incident indicating that they were not only “active participants but in fact leading the crowd”.Besides, the two men were stated to have 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 judgment, however, acquitted 10 other accused persons but convicted the MLAs and others, 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.They were found guilty of offences under Sections 147 (rioting), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object) of IPC but acquitted of criminal intimidation and damaging property charges..The court will hear the case on quantum of sentence on September 21..Additional Public Prosecutor Lalit Pingolia represented the State. Advocates Murari Kumar, Rahul Ranjan, Gorav Sharma, Achint Kumar for all accused persons except Tripathi..[Read Judgment]