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A Delhi Court today while discharging former AAP Councillor Tahir Hussain's brother Shah Alam & two others in a Delhi Riots case pulled up the Delhi Police for carrying out no real/effective investigation in the cases relating to Delhi Riots.

Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav said that the worst communal riots since partition in Delhi will be remembered in history for  the failure of investigating agency to conduct proper investigation by using latest scientific methods and it “will surely torment the sentinels of democracy.”

The court said that about 750 cases were registered in the North East Delhi Riots, out of which maximum cases were being tried by this court, elaborating the bench said, "There are a large number of accused persons who have been languishing in jail for the last about 1½ years merely on account of the fact that the trial in their cases are not being initiated."

“The police seems to be still busy in filing supplementary chargesheets therein. The precious judicial time of this Court is being wasted in giving dates in those cases. A lot of time of this Court is being consumed by the cases like the present one, where there is hardly any investigation carried out by the police”, the court said.

It was observed that in the present case the Investigating Officer had solved the case merely by filing a chargesheet without any real effort being made to trace out the eye witnesses, real accused persons and technical evidence.

“This does not appeal to the senses that nobody watched such a large crowd of rioters when they were on a spree of vandalism, looting and arson. The complaint was required to be investigated with a fair amount of sensitivity and skillfulness, but the same is missing in this investigation”, the court said.

The court further observed that recording of statement of identification of Constable Gyan Singh is "the be all and end all of the entire investigation.”

The court said that it cannot permit such cases to “meander mindlessly in the corridors of judicial system, sweeping away precious judicial time” of the court when the same is open and shut case.

The court further said that the sort of investigation conducted in the instant case and the lack of supervision thereof by the superior officers clearly depicts that the investigating agency has “merely tried to pull the wool over the Court’s eyes and nothing else”.

Pointing at the lackadaisical attitude of the Police, the court said that after conducting investigation, the police has shown up only five witnesses in the matter; one is the victim, other is Constable Gyan Singh, one Duty Officer, a formal witness and the IO. This the court observed was a  case of “colossal wastage of the hard earned money of tax-payers, without there being real intent of investigating the matter.”

The court accordingly discharged all the three accused persons, Shah Alam,  Rashid Saifi and Shadab from the case. QThe FIR was registered against the three under Sections 147, 148, 149, 427, 380, 454, 436, 435 and 120-B of IPC on the basis of two complaints alleging that a shop was burnt, attacked and looted during the riots.

Case Title: State vs Shah Alam and Ors