Shankar Mishra, the Air India passenger accused of urinating on a woman in a flight, on Friday denied the allegation before a Delhi court, PTI reported.
“I am not the accused...There must be someone else,” Mishra told Additional Sessions Judge Harjyot Singh Bhalla. “It seems she herself urinated. She was suffering from some disease related to prostate…”
Mishra’s claims are a complete departure from what his statements two days earlier, when he told a magistrate court that his act was not driven by sexual desire nor aimed at outraging the women’s modesty. He had also admitted that what he did was “revolting and appalling”.
According to the first information report filed by the Delhi Police, Mishra on November 26 had walked to the woman’s seat in the business class section in a drunken state, unzipped his pants and urinated on her.
The FIR stated that after the incident, the Air India crew brought Mishra to the woman’s seat and forced her to negotiate with him. In a letter to Tata Group Chairperson Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the woman had accused the crew of being “deeply unprofessional” while dealing with a “very traumatic situation”.
Mishra was arrested by the Delhi Police from Bengaluru on January 7. The court had sent him to 14-day judicial remand, denying police his custody.
On Friday, Advocate Ramesh Gupta, appearing for Mishra, told the court that owing to the seating arrangement on the flight, it was not possible for his client to go near the complainant’s seat, reported The Indian Express.
“Her seat could only be approached from behind, and in any case the urine could not reach to seat’s front area,” he told the court. “Also, the passenger sitting behind the complainant did not make any such complaint,” Mishra’s lawyer told the judge.”
The court was hearing a plea filed by the Delhi Police seeking revision of the order by the metropolitan magistrate which denied police custody on January 7.
During the hearing, Mishra’s counsel also accused the police of turning the case “into a joke”.
“Was this case so big? Was it a murder case that they reached Bangalore to arrest me [Shankar Mishra] and called me an absconder,” he told the court, according to PTI. “He was also removed from his job.”
Meanwhile, the Delhi Police said that it needed to interrogate Mishra to establish the sequence of events. The police also said they need to investigate whether Mishra had consumed anything before the flight.
“Questions like where did he hide and why was he not appearing before the agency needs to be answered,” the police said. “He had also switched off his phone.”
The court, however, said that several arguments in the case had not been previously dealt with at the magistrate court, reported PTI. The sessions judge disposed off the police’s application to revise the lower court order, and asked them to file a fresh plea with the magistrate.
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