Bilkis Bano was gang raped and her family massacred by rioters during the Gujarat riots of 2002.
A senior Gujarat police officer convicted for messing up the initial probe in the
Bilkis Bano gang rape has approached the Supreme Court
against the Bombay High Court's verdict but the top court has declined to stay the conviction. A vacation bench of Justices A K Sikri and Deepak Gupta told the Gujarat IPS officer RS Bhagora to first pay the fine imposed by the high court. The top court is expected to hear the officer's petition in July.
RS Bhagora was the senior-most of the five police officers convicted by the Bombay High Court last month
for fudging documents and compromising statements of witnesses to derail the probe into the gang rape of a
19-year-old pregnant woman, Bilkis Bano, during the Gujarat riots of 2002. Back then, he was a deputy superintendent of police and has moved up the hierarchy. A few years back, he was promoted to the Indian Police Service.
On Tuesday, Bhagora approached the Supreme Court with an "urgent plea" for a stay over fears that but the top court declined.
"There is no urgency in this case. Since the sentence had already undergone, what's the urgency? We won't stay the conviction," the Supreme Court said.
The High Court had ordered the five policemen to pay a fine Rs 15,000 and Rs 5,000 but spared them a jail term since they had already spent some in jail as undertrials.
As a local police officer in 2002-03, Bhagora was the officer who had tried to get the case closed back in 2003 but the Supreme Court ordered
a CBI probe on a petition by human rights activists.
The trial court initially rejected his report to close the case since he could trace the culprits in November 2002. A second closure report filed by the police in February 2003 was, however, accepted.
Bilkis Bano's family was attacked by a mob at Randhikpur village near Ahmedabad during the post-Godhra riots on 3 March 2002, and 14 members of her family massacred. The youngest of them was Bilkis Bano's two-year-old Saleha; her head was smashed on a rock. A pregnant Bilkis was gang raped. She survived, because they left her for dead, and came to symbolise the brutality witnessed during the 2002 riots.