M A I N   N E W S

SHIVANI MURDER CASE
I-G’s wife seeks meeting with PM
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 11
Madhu, wife of Mr Ravi Kant Sharma, I-G (Prisons), Haryana, has sought an appointment with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Sources close to the Sharmas say Madhu wants to apprise Mr Vajpayee of the conspiracy hatched by “somebody” to frame her husband in the case.

On August 8, Madhu had alleged at a press conference that the Delhi police was trying to implicate her husband in the murder case at the behest of “someone very influential and powerful in the Union Home Ministry” as part of the internal feud in the BJP. However, she clarified after one day that she had not meant either Mr L.K. Advani or Mr I.D. Swami, Union Home Minister and the Union Minister of State for Home, respectively. She said it was the Union Home Ministry itself which had conspired with the Delhi police to implicate her husband.

The sources say Madhu wanted to meet the Prime Minister so that no injustice could be done to her husband. They said she had already faxed the details of her husband’s defence to the President of India, the Prime Minister, the Chief Justice of India and the National Human Rights Commission, demanding a CBI probe into the Shivani murder case.

Meanwhile, Mr Ravi Kant Sharma is likely to move a Delhi court soon to seek anticipatory bail following the rejection of his similar plea by a Panchkula court. Mr Sharma is wanted by the Delhi police in connection with the murder of a Delhi-based reporter, Mrs Shivani Bhatnagar, who was done to death in 1999 by unknown persons. The Delhi police, which has already arrested two persons in this case, alleges that Shivani was murdered at the behest of Mr Sharma who had developed “close intimacy” with her when he was posted as OSD in the Prime Minister’s office. Shivani was covering the PMO for her newspaper.