Nirbhaya convict's father moves HC against rejection of complaint for FIR against sole witness

The father of one of the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case moved the Delhi High Court on Thursday challenging a trial court order rejecting his plea to lodge an FIR against the sole witness in the matter for allegedly charging money to give interviews to news channels.

The petition by Heera Lal Gupta, father of Pawan Kumar Gupta, is an appeal against the sessions court's January 27 decision dismissing his plea challenging a magisterial court's January 6 order rejecting his complaint to lodge an FIR against the sole eye-witness in the case.

The sole eyewitness, a friend of the 23-year-old victim, was accompanying her in the bus when the gruesome incident took place and he too was physically assaulted by the culprits.

Gupta, in his plea, has claimed that actions of the witness resulted in a media trial of the case and his son was, therefore, not provided a proper hearing.

The petition refers to tweets by a journalist of a media house who had claimed that the witness had charged money to give interviews to various news channels.

The plea claims "it is clear from the tweets that his (witness) testimony was false and fabricated" and therefore, it calls for an independent investigation into the alleged perjury committed by him.

A Delhi court on March 5 issued death warrants for execution of the four convicts -- Vinay Sharma (26), Akshay Kumar Singh (31), Mukesh Kumar Singh (32) and Pawan (26) -- on March 20.

Nirbhaya is the name given to the December 2012 victim, a physiotherapy intern, who was raped and brutally assaulted in a moving bus in South Delhi by six people.

She had boarded the nearly vacant bus in Munirka in South Delhi along with her male friend on her way back home on December 16 that year. After raping and brutalising the woman and beating her friend, the assailants had thrown them out of the bus.

After receiving initial treatment in New Delhi for a few days, she was shifted to the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore, where she succumbed to injuries on December 29, 2012.