New Delhi:
A CBI court in Delhi today found 17 Uttarakhand cops guilty of killing a 22-year-old MBA graduate in a fake encounter in 2009.
Ranbir Singh, an MBA student from Ghaziabad, was found dead with 29 bullet wounds on his body at Mohini Road in Dehradun in July 2009. The cops had alleged that he was part of an extortion racket.
While seven of them were convicted for murder, 10 were found guilty of criminal conspiracy and kidnapping to murder. Another was convicted only for destruction of evidence.
"Hope all police forces take lessons from this... that they cannot get away by killing an innocent person in a fake encounter," said Ranbir's father, Ravindra Singh after the court ruling.
The guilty policemen had claimed that they were chasing a gang of extortionists, and had stopped Ranbir at a check post. This, they alleged, triggered an altercation after which Ranbir tried to flee from the spot. Cops claimed they shot at him in order to stop him.
But Ranbir's family alleged foul play after which the case, which was first investigated by the Crime Branch of the state police, was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
The CBI, during its probe, found grave inconsistencies in the cops' version of the sequence of events.
For example, the bullet wounds on Ranbir's body showed that he had been fired at from a close range. Several other signs on the body also hinted at torture. No calls related to extortion were made from the victim's phone, the probe also revealed.
The CBI had charged 18 policemen in the case. While some were arrested soon after the murder, 11 others surrendered before the trial court in Delhi in 2012.