The Delhi High Court on Tuesday granted 10-day interim bail to expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in a case related to the custodial death of the father of a woman he was convicted of raping, Live Law reported.
In December 2019, Kuldeep Singh Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life for raping a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.
In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were handed a 10 year sentence for their involvement in the woman’s father’s death in judicial custody.
The former MLA recently approached the division bench of the High Court seeking interim suspension of his sentence on medical grounds, reported PTI.
On Tuesday, Justice Manoj Kumar Ohri allowed Kuldeep Singh Sengar’s plea and temporarily suspended his sentence, according to Live Law. The court noted that he had recently been granted similar relief in the rape case by a division bench.
The Delhi High Court had on December 5 granted interim bail for two weeks to Kuldeep Singh Sengar to undergo a medical procedure.
On Tuesday, Ohri directed that Sengar be released on a personal bond of Rs 50,000 and a surety of the same amount.
The woman’s father was arrested in an illegal arms case, in which he was later found to have been framed, in April 2018. He died in judicial custody in Unnao on April 9, a day after his daughter tried to self-immolate outside Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath’s house to protest the lack of action against Kuldeep Singh Sengar. A few days later, a murder case was filed against Sengar, his brother and nine others.
In March 2020, a court in Delhi convicted Kuldeep Singh Sengar of culpable homicide not amounting to murder for the death of the father of the woman.
The woman and her family had been provided security cover after a Supreme Court order in July 2019. The court had noted at the time that there was a threat to them and her lawyer’s life.
This came after the woman and her lawyer were severely injured in a car crash. Her family had alleged that Sengar was behind the accident. Two of the woman’s relatives, one of whom was a witness in the rape case, were killed.
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