Former JNU student leader Umar Khalid told a court here on Monday that statements of the witnesses in the Delhi riots conspiracy case were written by someone else and given to them as police did not have any evidence and a case can’t be made against him on half-truths.
Khalid and several others have been booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), a stringent anti-terror law, and are accused of being the “masterminds” of the north-east Delhi riots in February, 2020 which had left 53 people dead and over 700 injured.
Arguing his bail plea before Additional Sessions Judge Amitabh Rawat, senior advocate Trideep Pais read out the statements of three protected witnesses and claimed that they were contradictory and cooked up.
During the proceedings, Pais read out a police allegation from the chargesheet regarding an alleged secret meeting in Delhi’s Seelampur area on January 23 and 24 last year in which Khalid had allegedly directed that the protests be escalated to riots and result in the spilling of blood of policemen and others.
Denying that it was a secret meeting, Pais argued that its pictures were taken and uploaded on Facebook. “I did not know that secret meeting were put up on Facebook. Does it really look secret to this court?” he asked.
He also called the protected witness “Sierra”, who gave a statement to the police on this alleged secret meeting, “cooked up”. “From the statement, it is clear that Sierra is the tea seller who comes and gives tea in the meetings. He is the only witness who says that the meeting was secret. All other witnesses do not claim this. They all contradict each other,” Pais said.
He added, “How would a person speak in front of a tea seller and spill the entire beans of conspiracy? The witness waits from January to June and appears miraculously before the police. Clearly a cooked-up witness.”
Pais asked how a tea seller miraculously know the names of all the people in the secret meeting, including those who are not even there.
The advocate submitted, “He said Natasha Narwal was present but she was not there. Should you believe this man?”
“You [Police] can’t have half-truths to go and make a case against me. Clearly, these statements are written by someone else, given to these people to pass them off as theirs because you don’t have any evidence. So, you call people to the police station and tell them that I want to implicate so and so,” the lawyer said.
Pais further said that after Sierra did not record the statement before the Magistrate under section 164 of CrPC, the police moved on to another protected witness “Smith”.
Smith, however, did not say that the meeting was secret or took place in a secret office, the lawyer said. He added, “Reference to Umar Khalid is his presence in a meeting and nothing beyond that. So, the secret meeting theory is diminished by this witness.”
