HC serves notice on city police in BMW case

New Delhi, Sep 23 (UNI) Delhi High Court today served notice on the city police to explain the contentions raised by Sanjeev Nanda challenging a lower court's sentence of a five-year jail term in the 1999 BMW hit-and-run case.

Nanda was sentenced to five years in prison by a city court on September 5, 2008.

A bench comprising Justice Kailash Gambhir sought a response from the police. Senior counsel for Nanda, Mukul Rohatgi, said there was no incriminating evidence against him. Calling the trial court verdict wrong, he further added that the verdict was basically a media trial.

Nanda submitted before the High Court that the trial court had accepted the testimony of controversial prosecution eye-witness Sunil Kulkarni who, according to him, was not reliable because he had been in Mumbai and not in Delhi on the fateful day.

Among three other convicts, businessman Rajiv Gupta was awarded one year jail term while his two servants, Bhola Nath and Shyam Singh, were sentenced to six months in prison for destruction of evidence as they had washed the blood stains and victims' flesh pieces from the vehicle concerned at a house in Golf Links area here.

The court convicted Nanda under the IPC Section 304 (2), dealing with culpable homicide not amounting to murder for which the law prescribes ten years imprisonment as maximum punishment.

The ten-year-old case involves Nanda, son of arms dealer Suresh Nanda and grandson of former Navy chief SM Nanda. He had allegedly, driving his BMW in an inebriated state, overrun six people in Lodhi Colony area on January 10, 1999.

UNI SSS AM BD1845