New Delhi/Lucknow/Unnao: The Supreme Court Friday deferred its order transferring to a Delhi court the case lodged after the road crash that left the Unnao rape victim critically injured and will take a call later on airlifting her to AIIMS, an option her family is at liberty to exercise anytime.
The apex court will on Monday pass orders on whether the woman should be moved to AIIMS in Delhi, it said while taking note of the “hesitation” among family members “at this stage”. But it said the family members can approach the court anytime if they decide to shift her to Delhi.
As the victim remained on ventilator support at a Lucknow hospital, assigned 20 more members to a help a five member team already probing the truck-car collision in Raebareli that killed the woman’s two aunts.
The woman and her lawyer are admitted at the trauma centre of King George’s Medical University. The woman’s family alleges that the collision was a deliberate attempt to kill her by those close to expelled BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. He is already in jail, arrested last year for allegedly raping the woman when she was a minor in 2017.
The apex court also directed shifting the 19-year-old woman’s uncle Mahesh Singh “immediately” and “under armed escort” from a Raebareli jail to the Tihar prison in Delhi.
The compliance report on this should be laid before the court on Monday, it ordered.
Singh was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in a two-decade-old case filed by Sengar’s brother Atul Singh.
Senior advocate V Giri, assisting the court as amicus curiae, told the bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Deepak Gupta that the victim’s mother wanted her to be treated at the Lucknow hospital for the time being.
The apex court then deferred the matter till Monday, noting that there appeared to be “some hesitation on the part of the family members at this stage” to shift her.
The bench gave the liberty to the families of the woman and her lawyer to approach the Supreme Court’s secretary general at any point for shifting them to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi.
The apex court had on Thursday transferred all five cases related to the rape victim from a Lucknow court to a court in Delhi, with directions to hold trial on a daily basis.
But in its hearing on Friday it made an exception for the accident case to enable the CBI to carry out its investigation.
The Central Bureau of Investigation argued that with the shifting of the case the local court faces a technical hurdle in passing remand orders for those arrested during its probe.
The CBI has booked 10 people, including Sengar, for murder after taking over the road crash case. Six experts from the Central Forensic Sciences Laboratory reached the accident site on Friday morning to recreate the crime scene with the help of truck and a car of the same make one in which the victim was travelling.
In Lucknow, the Uttar Pradesh police ordered a probe after a policeman posted at the jail where Sengar is lodged was seen in a video purportedly accepting a bribe from a man considered close to the legislator.
“If policemen are found guilty, they will be dismissed,” Director General, Prisons, Anand Kumar said. Rinku Shukla, the man in the video, is a panchayat member from Unnao.
He told reporters that he was not bribing the policeman to meet Sengar, the Bangermau MLA.
“It is my habit. I might have given money to him for having tea as he was standing there,” he said. Meanwhile, Sengar’s arms licence is yet to be cancelled. Unnao District Magistrate Divendra Kumar Pandey said a decision on this has to be taken by the court after hearing both sides. Both the police and Sengar’s lawyers have filed their reports on the matter, but the hearing could not take place because of a lawyers’ strike, he said. (PTI)
