New Delhi, Dec 11: The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a plea by former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt seeking suspension of the 20-year jail sentence awarded to him in a 1996 drug seizure case. A bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi said it was not inclined to entertain the petition.
The apex court was hearing Bhatt’s appeal challenging the sentence imposed by a sessions court in Palanpur, Banaskantha district of Gujarat, which had convicted him for his role in a 1996 case involving the alleged planting of drugs.
Bhatt was held guilty of falsely implicating Rajasthan-based lawyer Sumersingh Rajpurohit by claiming that police had recovered drugs from a hotel room in Palanpur where the lawyer was staying. Bhatt, who served as superintendent of police in Banaskantha in 1996 and was dismissed from service in 2015, oversaw the district police team that arrested Rajpurohit.
Investigations later revealed that Rajpurohit had been falsely framed to pressure him into transferring a disputed property in Pali, Rajasthan. Former police inspector I.B. Vyas had approached the Gujarat High Court in 1999 seeking a thorough probe. Bhatt was subsequently arrested by the state CID in September 2018 under the NDPS Act and has been lodged in Palanpur sub-jail since then.
Last year, Bhatt moved the Supreme Court seeking transfer of the trial to another sessions court on grounds of bias and requested directions for recording trial proceedings. The Supreme Court, however, dismissed the plea and imposed a cost of ₹3 lakh for making allegations against the trial judge. (Agencies)
