Pawan Gupta, one of the four death-row convicts in the 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder case, on Wednesday moved a Delhi court seeking the filing of cases against two constables for allegedly assaulting him in jail, PTI reported. Akshay Thakur, Vinay Sharma, Mukesh Singh and Pawan Gupta are scheduled to be hanged at Tihar Jail in Delhi on March 20 at 5.30 am.
AP Singh, the counsel for Gupta, said the court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Karkardooma will hear his claim on Thursday at 2 pm.
The criminal complaint alleged that Gupta was violently assaulted by the two constables on July 26 and July 29 when he was lodged in the Mandoli central jail in East Delhi. Gupta has alleged that he received serious head injuries and was treated at Guru Teg Bahadur government hospital in Shahdara, where he received 14 stitches.
The complaint seeks a direction to the station house officer of Harsh Vihar police station to register a first information report against Anil Kumar and another unidentified constable for assaulting him. Since Gupta is to be executed soon, it is necessary for him to appear before a court as a witness to identify the policemen, the complaint added.
Last week, President Ram Nath Kovind rejected Gupta’s mercy petition. Soon after, the Delhi government moved a trial court to seek fresh death warrants for the four convicts as all others’ mercy pleas had already been rejected.
The four convicts were given the death penalty, first by a trial court in September 2013, which was upheld by the Delhi High Court six months later, and the Supreme Court in May 2017.
The four men, along with two others, raped and brutally assaulted a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a moving bus in Delhi on the night of December 16, 2012. The woman succumbed to her injuries two weeks later at a hospital in Singapore. The gangrape triggered huge protests in the Capital and across the country. One convict died in prison, while a minor convict was sent to a detention home for juveniles and was released in December 2015.
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