10 accused cleared of arson as court says police covering flaw
New Delhi: A Delhi court on Wednesday dropped arson charges against ten Muslim men in a clubbed FIR related to the north-east Delhi riots last February, saying that the police was, in fact, trying to cover up its flaws of having clubbed complaints of two different dates into a single FIR.
The case was registered on the basis of three complaints — one Birjpal stated that his rented shop was looted by a riotous mob at Brijpuri road on February 25, while Diwan Singh claimed that two of his shops were looted on February 24.
Revoking the arson charges, Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav noted the complainants did not state a single word regarding the riotous mob committing "mischief by fire or explosive substance" in their initial statements.
Diwan Singh, in his supplementary statement, stated however that the riotous mob put his shop on fire, to which the court said that the investigating agency cannot cover up the flaw by recording the supplementary statements if the offence of arson was not there in initial complaints made to the police.
The judge further said that arson charges cannot be invoked merely on the basis of statements of police witnesses who were posted as beat officers in the area on the date of the incident.
ASJ Yadav said that he is unable to comprehend how an incident that took place on February 24 can be clubbed with the incident which occurred on February 25 unless and until there is clear evidence that the same rioters were operating on both dates.
In view of the aforesaid discussion, I am of the considered view that ingredients of Section 436 IPC [mischief by fire or explosive substance] are not at all made out from the material produced on record by the investigating agency, the judge said.
The 10 accused are Mohd Shahnawaz, Mohd Shoaib, Shahrukh, Rashid, Azad, Ashraf Ali, Parvez, Mohd Faizal, Rashid, Mohd Tahir.
The other sections invoked in the chargesheet such as Sections 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting, armed with a deadly weapon), 149 (unlawful assembly), 188 (disobedience to order by public servant), 354 (assault), 392 (robbery), 427 (mischief), 452 (house trespass), 153-A (promoting disharmony on grounds of religion), 506 (criminal intimidation) are exclusively triable by a Magistrate, ASJ Yadav said, ordering for the case to be transferred to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate.
Ever since the Delhi riots investigations have begun, clubbed FIRs have stood in the way of many victims wanting justice for what had happened to them. Millennium Post had earlier this year reported how many accused are without any credible reasoning arrested and charged in clubbed cases and how many victims are still fighting to get a separate FIR on their complaints.
In fact, there have also been cases where the police have charged a man in a clubbed case, where he is himself a complainant.
Communal clashes had broken out in northeast Delhi in February 2020, after violence between the Citizenship (Amendment) Act supporters and its protesters spiraled out of control leaving at least 53 people dead and over 700 injured.
