New Delhi, May 17 (IANS) A key eyewitness in the infamous 1999 BMW hit-and-run case Thursday identified former Indian Navy chief S.M. Nanda’s grandson Sanjeev Nanda as one of the occupants of the killer-car that mowed down six people in the capital.
At end of his deposition in the court of Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Kumar, Mumbai-based trader Sunil Kulkarni pointed at Sanjeev Nanda said that he saw him climbing out of a black BMW car minutes after it had run over the six people, who were sleeping on a pavement in Lodhi Road in central Delhi.
Kulkarni said he witnessed the early-morning incident while on his way to the railway station to catch a train to Mumbai.
After the accident, he said, two men climbed out of the car and one of them told the other “Sanjeev, let’s go,” before the car sped away.
Kulkarni, however, said that he was not able to identify the other occupants of the car, pointing out that the incident had happened too many years ago for him to remember all the details and faces.
According to the prosecution, six people, including three policemen, were crushed to death by a BMW car allegedly driven by Sanjeev Nanda, who is said to have been drunk, in the early hours of Jan 10, 1999.
Two of Nanda’s friends, Siddhartha Gupta and Manik Kapoor, were also named in the case along with his domestic aids Bhola Nath and Shyam Singh Rana, who had cleaned the car after the incident and was charged with destruction of evidence.
The judge fixed the next date for hearing on May 29, when Kulkarni is to be cross-examined by defence counsel Ramesh Gupta.
Today’s hearing went ahead despite a bid by Nanda to stall Kulkarni’s deposition – Nanda had approached the Delhi High Court saying the prosecution had dropped Kulkarni from its list of witnesses because he was not keen to support an earlier statement he had made to a magistrate.
But Kulkarni contested the claim, saying that it was the police that was bent upon turning him hostile – they had picked him up on two occasions in August 1999, before his deposition, to harass him.
But the High Court refused to stay Kulkarni’s testimony and prevented the defence and prosecution from cross-examining him until further orders. This particular question will come up for hearing in the High Court on May 23.
During the trial, the prosecution had dropped Kulkarni as an “unreliable witness”, suspecting that he had been won over by the accused, despite the fact that he had recorded a statement before a magistrate indicting Nanda.
On March 19, the judge, using his powers to recall a witness, summoned Kulkarni to depose.
Two other witnesses, Manoj Malik and Harishankar, a petrol pump attendant who had informed police about the incident, have already turned hostile. Malik had told the court that it was a truck, not a car that had killed the sleeping people.