High profile cops appear in SC

High profile IPS officers -- CBI director Alok Kumar Verma and Delhi Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik -- today marked their presence before the Supreme Court which had summoned them for their alleged lapses and laxity.

Verma and Patnaik, both UT cadre IPS officers, were summoned in connection with the Manipur fake encounter killings and traffic congestion in the national capital respectively.

The CBI chief is a 1979-batch officer and Patnaik is from the 1985 batch of the cadre.

Verma appeared before a bench of Justices M B Lokur and U U Lalit and gave an explanation about the status of probe into the cases of fake encounters involving the Army, the Assam Rifles and the Manipur Police.

The Delhi police commissioner appeared before a separate bench of Justices Lokur and Deepak Gupta, which directed him to come out with a time-line for removing traffic bottlenecks at 77 congested corridors in the city.

Verma, who apprised the bench that two charge sheets have been filed in cases of alleged fake encounters, made most of the submissions himself as the questions were directly put to him.

Patnaik had to do less of the talking as the hearing went on for less than 20 minutes.

The hearing in the Manipur case involving the CBI chief went for one hour and forty five minutes.

The CBI director had been summoned by the apex court, which was unhappy over the "unduly long time" taken by the agency in probing the cases of alleged extra-judicial killings and fake encounters in Manipur.

Patnaik was asked to appear before it to explain solution to the traffic congestion in the city.