The Delhi police on Monday charge-sheeted Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia in the case of alleged assault on his Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash in February this year.
The probe agency filed the charge sheet in the court of Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal at the Patiala House courts who fixed August 25 as the date for hearing arguments on taking cognisance of the charges and summoning the accused persons.
Five Delhi Ministers — Satyendar Jain, Kailash Gahlot, Gopal Rai, Rajendra Pal Gautam and Imran Hussain — have termed the charge sheet bogus. “It is the latest example of the Central government’s ongoing unprecedented witch-hunt against the Delhi government,’’ they said in a joint statement.
11 MLAs too in list
Besides the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister, the police have also named as many as 11 AAP MLAs as accused in the charge sheet. These MLAs are Amanatullah Khan, Prakash Jarwal, Nitin Tyagi, Rituraj Govind, Sanjeev Jha, Ajay Dutt, Rajesh Rishi, Rajesh Gupta, Madan Lal, Praveen Kumar and Dinesh Mohania.
According to the FIR, the Chief Secretary was allegedly assaulted at the camp office at Mr. Kejriwal’s residence at midnight on February 19. The Chief Minister had called the meeting to discuss certain “burning issues.”
The accused have been charge-sheeted, among other offences, for criminal intimidation (506), criminal conspiracy (120B), wrongfully confining any person (342), voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty (332) and if an offence is committed by any member of an unlawful assembly, every other member of such assembly shall be guilty of the offence (149) of the IPC.
A team headed by Additional DCP (north) Harinder Singh had questioned Mr. Kejriwal for about three hours at his residence on May 18.
Later, a Delhi court had rejected Mr. Kejriwal’s plea to direct the police to give him a copy of his statements. “The investigation agency is not obliged under law to give a copy of the statement to the person whose statement it has recorded...,” the court had then said.
