MUMBAI: The Bombay high court held five policemen from Gujarat guilty on Thursday in a rare conviction of government servants in a post-Godhra riots case. The HC set aside their acquittal by a trial court and convicted them, along with two doctors, on charges of destroying evidence and attempting to shield the accused.

The order came in the case of the gangrape of Bilkis Bano and the murder of eight members of her family, including two children, amid communal violence in 2002 after ‘kar sevaks’ were killed in a fire on the Sabarmati express.

The high court also upheld the convictions and life sentences awarded to 11 others by the trial court for the gangrape of Bilkis and two other women and the murders.

The maximum sentence the policemen attract for offences under section 201 and 218 of IPC is three years imprisonment. However, since they have already spent four and half years in custody before the trial, they will be allowed to go free. The court has also imposed a fine of Rs 20,000 on the seven cops, which has to be paid to Bilkis.

The policemen and doctors had fudged medical examination records and post-mortem reports when a probe began into the incident. Their actions were “intended to screen offenders, hence their acquittal deserves to be set aside,” said the bench of Justices V K Tahilramai and Mridula Bhatkar.

Doctors in the dock

The court noted, “It is evident that they (doctors) were not only casual in conducting the postmortem but suppressed the material information by way of omission. All the acts of commission and omission of the police and the medical officers cannot be examined in isolation but they are well connected with each other in a chain of suppression of facts causing disappearance of the evidence with intent to screen the offenders and save them from punishment. Hence, their acquittal deserves to be set aside.”

The order read, “The postmortem conducted by the doctors were perfunctory and manipulated and done in order to cause disappearance of evidence and to screen the offenders.”

The court also said, “In our considered opinion and after close scrutiny of the evidence, we could read between the lines which show that the medical officers have completely failed to perform the postmortem of all the bodies as is expected under the law. The medical officer, who is entrusted to perform the postmortem of the dead bodies, is duty bound to give all details of the injuries and the cause of death.”

While rejecting the plea of the CBI seeking death penalty for three accused namely Jaswantbhai, Govindbhai and Shailesh, the court said, “though such crime is not justifiable and is shunned, we are of the view that it is not a case wherein the sentence imposed would be completely inadequate and would not meet the ends of justice.”

The bench said the cops and doctors acted in concert to falsify and destroy evidence to protect the 11 men who had raped and murdered members of Bilkis Bano’s family.

The bench dismissed appeals filed by the 11 men who were first convicted by a special trial court in Mumbai in 2008. Upholding the life sentences given to them, HC said though it was a heinous crime, life sentence cannot be said to be inadequate. Taking the 15 years of custody into account, it dismissed a plea by the CBI to enhance the sentence to death for three of the convicts for raping Bilkis and murdering the others including an infant and a tot, whose bodies were not found. The CBI said 14 were murdered in all, but bodies of only seven were found, including two boys and a girl.

The HC held they were “not hard core criminals.” But, “From the clinching evidence placed before us, we are convinced that all these accused were moving in search of Muslims in a mob due to Godhra incident…as soon as they saw them, they pounced on them, assaulted them and raped the women.”

During the hearings, defence counsel Harshad Ponda had countered the CBI’s arguments saying Bilkis was never raped. She had “put out a false story” he said. He consistently questioned her credibility, her testimony, even the reliability of a star eye-witness, her 12 year old nephew, whose deposition, he said, was “replete with contradictions.”

Ponda stressed that the victims’ photographs at the site were never taken by the police, but the CBI had relied on them to establish the crime.