SC notice to R K Sharma in Shivani murder case

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice to former IPS officer R K Sharma as it seemed to agree with the Delhi government’s petition that Delhi High Court did not take into account vital evidence while acquitting the main accused in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case.
Responding to Delhi government’s petition challenging the acquittal of Sharma and others, a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana P Desai prima facie agreed that the HC had erred in disbelieving a series of recorded conversations between Sharma and his alleged accomplices just because the prosecution could not explain one set of recorded conversations.
“The appeal court appears to have not taken into account material evidence,” the bench said, after additional solicitor general Harin Raval and advocate Siddharth Dave argued that for the HC not to take into account a series of recorded conversations between Sharma, allegedly the mastermind of the conspiracy to murder Shivani, was miscarriage of justice.
Raval showed to the bench the constant telephonic communication between Bhagwan Sharma and R K Sharma, and said the HC had completely ignored this vital piece of evidence.
Justices Alam and Desai wondered why the HC did not discuss these call records in its judgment acquitting R K Sharma. The bench also issued notices to Bhagwan Sharma and Satya Prakash, R K Sharma’s alleged partners in the crime.
R K Sharma and others have been asked to respond to Delhi Police’s charge that they played key roles in executing the plan hatched by the former IPS officer to kill journalist Shivani in 1999.
Delhi government had on January 11 moved the SC with an 80-page appeal assailing the HC’s conclusion that the police failed to produce cogent evidence to link R K Sharma, Bhagwan Sharma and Satya Prakash, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the trial court, to the crime. The HC had upheld the conviction and life term for the hitman, Pradeep Sharma.
The government said the HC had failed to appreciate the clear chain of evidence along with circumstantial proof to indicate their close involvement in the conspiracy to kill Shivani in her Navkunj Apartments flat in Patparganj in east Delhi on January 21, 1999.
It said the criminal conspiracy masterminded by R K Sharma was evident from the telephone records of the acquitted persons who allegedly planned to hire Pradeep Sharma to kill the journalist.
R K Sharma’s counsel had pleaded before the HC that Delhi Police had tampered with telephone records to implicate him in the case.
At the time of the murder, R K Sharma was working in the Prime Minister’s Office. He went missing soon after his name surfaced as an accused in the case and surrendered only in September 2002.