The Delhi High Court on Friday upheld the charges framed against real estate barons Sushil and Gopal Ansal, and five others for tampering with documents in the 1997 Uphaar fire case. The court held that the material on record gave rise to the suspicion that the accused had, in fact, committed the offences.
‘Trial court not at fault’
Rejecting the revision petitions of the Ansal brothers and co-accused Anoop Singh and D. V. Malhotra, Justice Siddharth Mridul noted in his 106-page judgment, “...in my view, prima facie, there was sufficient ground for proceeding against the accused. Further, there is adequate material for presuming that the accused had committed the offences for which they have been charged. Therefore, the trial court cannot be faulted for forming a presumptive opinion regarding the existence of the factual ingredients constituting the offences alleged, and for the framing of charges on the basis of a strong suspicion...”
The Ansal brothers and the other accused had challenged the May 31, 2014, order of a Magisterial court that charged them with offences under sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 109 (abetment), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and 409 (criminal breach of trust) of the IPC.
The trial court had also framed charges against H.S. Panwar, the then Fire Officer of the Delhi Fire Service who had issued an NOC to Uphaar Cinema for fire safety and fabricated a proforma inspection report without conducting an inspection; Dinesh Chand Sharma, ahalmad of the court where the main case was pending; and one Prem Prakash Batra, stenographer at the legal cell at Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Limited.
Among the evidence tampered with were documents showing that Sushil Ansal, as the chairman, had direct control over the functioning of Uphaar Cinema, and a page from the file of the Delhi Fire Service that showed that Mr. Panwar had visited Uphaar for an inspection just a month prior to the tragedy.
Documents went missing
Justice Mridul added, “It has also been urged that the alleged destruction of documents did not, in fact, benefit the accused persons in any manner and, therefore, the object of conspiracy was not achieved. This submission is eminently untenable and in the teeth of the well-settled position of law that the offence of conspiracy is independent of its fruition...”
The case about tampering of evidence began as an off-shoot to the main Uphaar fire case when the public prosecutor noticed in 2002 that certain documents gathered by the probe agency were missing from the court file, while some others were torn or had ink spilt on them.
The matter was brought to the notice of the Sessions Judge, after which ahalmad D. C. Sharma was removed from services in 2004.
He was later found to have taken up a job with A-Plus Security Agency, which had a contract with Star Estate Management Limited (SEML), at a salary higher than his counterparts. As many as 90% of SEML’s shares were held in the names of Sushil and Gopal Ansal.
Accused Anoop Singh, the chairman of the security agency, had offered the job to Mr. Sharma based on the recommendation of D.V. Malhotra of SEML. Anoop Singh had allegedly used a fluid over Mr. Sharma’s name in the firm’s wage register. Instead, he wrote a fictitious name when he came to know about the investigation.
AVUT moved petition
It was on the basis of a petition moved by the Association of the Victims of the Uphaar Tragedy (AVUT) that the Delhi High Court had in May 2006 directed the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police to register a case of tampering of evidence.
The court also rejected the Ansal brothers’ argument denying direct contact between them and D. C. Sharma.
