A Delhi court on Friday convicted real estate barons Sushil and Gopal Ansal for tampering with evidence in the 1997 case of the Uphaar Cinema fire which claimed 59 lives.
Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Pankaj Sharma also held former court staff Dinesh Chand Sharma and two others — PP Batra and Anoop Singh — guilty in the case and said the misconception of all the accused persons that they will get away with their nefarious design from punishment has been exposed to the world at large.
The judge held that the guilt of the Ansal brothers, Sharma, Batra, and Singh was “proved beyond any reasonable doubt” for the offence of criminal conspiracy, causing disappearance of evidence of offence and criminal breach of trust by the public servant.
The court said that the convicts destructed critical documents which were capable of proving their complicity in the main case, “making this time the justice dispensation system as the victim.”
“They tampered/obliterated/defaced some hand-picked documents of the said case through a meticulous planning in order to escape punishment by scuttling trial process and as such fiddled with our judicial system with great impunity,” the judge said.
The court said the manner in which the process of law was subjected to desecration by convicts was “no less than defiling the justice administration system.”
“The high-handedness of the accused persons for securing benefit in the trial sans documents by any means demonstrate the scant regard which they have for the justice delivery system which is the bedrock of our democracy,” the judge said.