The grandfather of a 25-year-old farmer, who died during the tractor rally on Republic Day, moved the Delhi High Court on Wednesday seeking a court-monitored Special Investigating Team (SIT) probe into the incident.
The plea, which is listed for hearing before Justice Yogesh Khanna on Thursday, states that the circumstances in which Navreet Singh lost his life are “highly suspicious”. According to the plea, “eyewitness statements corroborated by medical opinion do not rule out that the petitioner’s grandson was shot by policemen”.
‘No investigation’
“The Delhi police have without any inquiry or investigation hastily prejudged the cause of death by declaring that the petitioner’s grandson died in an accident and there were no bullets fired,” says the petition filed by 69-year-old Hardeep Singh.
The plea filed through advocates Vrinda Grover, Soutik Banerjee, Mannat Tipnis and Devika Tulsiani alleges that “the post-mortem report of the petitioner’s grandson, while stopping short of mentioning that firearm injuries were present on the body, describes the wounds in a manner that irresistibly suggests that there is a high possibility of him having received a gunshot/firearm injury”.
It also contends that X-rays conducted prior to the post-mortem by District Hospital, Rampur, were not shared with the petitioner’s family, nor was the video of the post-mortem shared, “despite its request”.
The petition further states, “The conspectus of publicly available material, including eye witness accounts and forensic expert opinion strongly suggests that the possibility of the Petitioner’s grandson having been killed due to firing by policemen cannot be ruled out, and it therefore requires an independent, robust, impartial and fair investigation”.
