The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case of five murders during anti-Sikh riots in west Delhi’s Raj Nagar, in which senior Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was convicted on Monday, is not the only case in which the former parliamentarian is said to be involved.
A three-member special investigation team (SIT), formed to reinvestigate the cases of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, is probing Kumar’s alleged role in two other cases. One of them includes the twin murders of a man and his son in west Delhi’s Punjabi Bagh. The Ministry of Home Affairs(MHA) had constituted the SIT in 2015.
The two cases are among the eight that the SIT reopened for investigation. An official said Kumar has already been interrogated twice during the probe. He was last interrogated by the team in March last year.
An official said the case is related to the murder of Jaswant Singh and his son, Hardeep Singh. Singh’s wife, Dajleet Kaur, is an eyewitness. The woman in her statement to the police in 1991 has reportedly accused Kumar of instigating the mob to attack the Sikhs in her neighbourhood in the aftermath of the death of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Delhi police had registered the case in 1991 but closed the probe in 1993.
“This is an important case against Kumar. This is the one case in which there is an eyewitness. The team is yet to file a chargesheet in court. In the two other cases, too, his role has come up but the evidence in the third case is not very strong,” an official familiar with the case details said on condition of anonymity.
In 2015, after the SIT was formed, the team re-examined 293 cases which were closed by the Delhi police. Of the 293 cases, the team filed closure reports in 233 cases, citing lack of evidence. In 52 cases, the team filed reports in which the victims or the accused were not traced and started probe in eight cases. Of the eight cases, the police filed a chargesheet in five, while the remaining three are pending investigation. Kumar is one of the alleged accused in these three cases.
In November, a city court awarded death sentence to man for the murder of two men in south Delhi’s Mahipalpur on November 1, 1984. This was one of the five cases in which the police had filed a chargesheet.
First Published: Dec 17, 2018 23:49 IST
