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Shivani
Bhatnagar
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New Delhi, March 18
Dressed in a pink T-shirt and brown trousers, the suspended Inspector General of Police R.K Sharma remained impassive as the Additional Sessions Judge Rajender Kumar Shastri pronounced judgement in a packed court room today and held Sharma, along with three others, guilty in the Shivani Bhatnagar murder case.
The court held Sharma guilty of hatching the conspiracy to murder Shivani, an Indian Express correspondent, who had allegedly threatened to expose the suspended IPS officer for leaking classified information to her, nine years ago.
Three other co-accused, Bhagwan Sharma, Pradeep Sharma and Satya Prakash, were also held guilty for executing the suspended police official’s plot to kill Shivani.
Two accused, Ved Prakash Sharma and Ved Prakash, alias Kalu, were, however, acquitted for want of evidence. The court would pronounce the quantum of sentence, which may range from life-term to death penalty, on March 20. Shivani was found murdered at her home in Navkunj Apartments in east Delhi on January 23, 1999. The investigation into the case took over three years and the trial commenced in 2003.
The five-year-long trial saw the prosecution examine a total of 209 witnesses to prove its allegations against the accused. As many as 51 witnesses turned hostile. In its bid to substantiate its claim against the accused, the prosecution relied upon the phone call records of the alleged conversations of R.K Sharma with the deceased as well as the co-accused.
According to the prosecution, Sharma, a former Officer on Special Duty in the Prime Minister’s Office , had leaked certain classified documents to the deceased scribe. It was claimed that Shivani, who was intimate with the accused, had threatened to expose him, after he started ignoring her in 1998. It was claimed that R.K Sharma was scared that Shivani might expose him and thus he hatched a conspiracy to get her killed.
Sharma did not react even as his relatives and friends in the court tried to console him after hearing the decision.
