'Last Warning For Prosecution To Wake Up': Court Pulls Up Delhi Police For Presenting 'Irrelevant' Witnesses In Riots Case

Issuing a "last warning for prosecution to wake up", a trial court has pulled up the Delhi Police for presenting 'irrelevant' witnesses for examination before it in a 2020 riots case.

"Despite repeated directions given, in the past in a number of cases, for the prosecution to go through the record and to check, if everything is well with the record, such pain was not taken in this case, either by ld. Prosecutor or by the IO. One more last opportunity has been sought by the IO as well as representative of ld. Prosecutor," the court said in an order passed on Monday.

Additional Sessions Judge Pulastya Pramachala said the court will not tolerate "such mishappenings" in the future.

"At the cost of repetition of previous directions, it is again reminded that before obtaining summons for any witness, a duty has been cast upon the IO and the ld. Prosecutor to ensure relevance of such witness in the case and apparently it was not so done. Therefore, they must take care in future," said the court.

The order was passed in connection with the trial proceedings of an FIR registered by Khajuri Khas police station against Noor Mohammad alias Noora and Nabi Mohammad. Both the accused are out on bail and the trial is at the stage of examination of prosecution witnesses.

On Monday, a witness Manoj Kumar was present before the court. The counsel appearing for accused Noora pointed out that there is no mention of complaint of Kumar in the charges framed in the matter.

The court was told that several complaints were clubbed with the case but charges were framed only in respect of two complaints made by Dalip and Shiv Kumar Raghav.

Examining the material on record, the IO and Special Public Prosecutor conceded that charges were not framed in respect of the complaint made by Manoj Kumar, who was present in court or even by another witness, who was also summoned for Tuesday.

"It has been also pointed out that in the charges, wrong date of incident has been mentioned," the court said in the order.

Since charges did not mention the incident related to Manoj Kumar or the witness summoned for Tuesday, the court said there is no purpose to examine them.

"For the aforesaid reason, date of tomorrow i.e. 15.11.2022 is also cancelled. Now to come up on date already fixed i.e. 29.11.2022, and before that date the prosecution shall must take all requisite steps," said the court.

The FIR was initially registered on the complaint of Dalip Singh wherein he stated that on February 24, 2020, his automobiles service centre was attacked by a mob. He alleged that the mob also set on fire 15 motorcycles, robbed his mobile phone and also looted cash.

Title: State v. Noor Mohammad etc.