Court asks witness to segregate documents from sanction file

A court here today asked a senior Delhi government official to segregate the relevant documents, which the defence can see, from file relating to sanction for prosecution of Congress leader Sajjan Kumar and others in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case.
District Judge J R Aryan also asked prosecution witness Vishwendra Singh, the then Deputy Secretary (Home) of city government and now private secretary of the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, to separate those documents in the file which the defence lawyers can see and which they cannot see being official communication.
Singh has also been asked to sort out the part of the file on which the official is claiming privilege.

The court has fixed February 17, the next date of hearing in the case.
Singh was earlier asked by the court to produce records relating to grant of sanction to prosecute Kumar and three other accused in the case.
He had, however, sought time to seek permission from the Lieutenant Govenor's (LG) office for showing records of sanction of January, 1, 2010 and later on filed an affidavit seeking "privilege" for not producing the complete file containing the official notings.
The affidavit was opposed by Kumar and others on the ground that the prosecution cannot withhold documents as the court has to see whether sanction granted by government to prosecute the accused was valid or not.