Senior Delhi government officials on Thursday said that Delhi home minister Satyendar Jain has directed his department to issue an immediate order for the appointment of senior advocates Rebecca John and Vishal Gosain as senior public prosecutors in the Ankit Saxena murder case.

Saxena, a 23-year-old photographer, was stabbed to death on February 1, 2018, allegedly by the family members of a woman he was in a relationship with in West Delhi’s Khyala. On October 5, the Aam Aadmi Party-led government in Delhi had announced John and Gosain as the special public prosecutors in the case to represent the state in the trial.

For months, the file pertaining to the appointment of John and Gosain as the special public prosecutors kept moving back and forth between the government’s law department and home department, a senior government official said. The official further said, Jain had issued a similar order at least once, earlier this year, but nothing had happened.

Jain, however, did not respond to phone calls and text messages.

Earlier in the day, Aam Aadmi Party’s spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj said in a press conference that the government has initiated the process of clearing the file pertaining to John and Gosain’s appointment as special public prosecutors in the Ankit Saxena case but he did not comment on what took the government more than eight months to do so.

“The AAP government’s only objective is to bring justice for the family of Ankit Saxena. Both Rebecca John and Vishal Gosain had agreed to represent the government in the case,” Bharadwaj said.

First Published: Jun 14, 2019 06:25 IST