Ghoud has been charge-sheeted by the CBI in a 2007 fake encounter case. However, he got away with that because the erstwhile Akhilesh Yadav administration refused to give permission to prosecute him
Clarion India
LUCKNOW – The Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up by the Yogi Adityanath government to probe the killing of notorious gangster Vikas Dubey has raised many eyebrows as one of its three officers was earlier charge-sheeted in a fake encounter case in Uttar Pradesh.
DIG Ravinder Ghoud, along with additional secretary Sanjay Bhoosreddy and additional DG of UP Police Hariram Sharma, is part of the SIT team which has been formed to investigate the encounter of the gangster.
Dubey, who had surrendered to the Madhya Pradesh Police after killing 8 policemen, was killed by the UP Police in an encounter which is being believed to be a fake one.
According to a report published by The Wire, Ghoud has been charge-sheeted by the CBI in a 2007 fake encounter case. However, he got away with that because the erstwhile Akhilesh Yadav administration refused to give permission to prosecute him. Later, the Adityanath regime also did not give permission to bring him to justice.
Ghoud, then an assistant superintendent of police, was an accused in a case of gunning down a young medicine trader Mukul Gupta on 30 June 2007 by declaring him a ‘wanted mafia don’. Gupta’s father Brijendra Gupta took the matter to the Allahabad High Court demanding a CBI probe into the encounter. The court accepted his plea and ordered a CBI investigation. The CBI charge-sheeted 10 policemen, including Ghoud in August 2014.
But the fake encounter accused were not brought to justice because the state government did not allow it to happen. Then, the parents of Gupta moved the High Court to direct the state government to give permission to prosecute the charge-sheeted policemen. But shockingly, the parents were murdered in 2015.
The inclusion of tainted officer Ghoud into the SIT for probing Dubey’s killing is being seen as a way to give a clean chit to the policemen involved in his ‘fake’ encounter.
“It is really shocking to find that someone who is tainted with a fake encounter has been asked to probe what is widely seen as another fake encounter”, said I.B. Singh, senior advocate of the high court
Ghoud’s tainted past has come into light after a journalist who was following Gupta’s fake encounter wrote about it.
“No sooner than I learnt about the SIT probe, I was reminded about Ghoud’s charge-sheet in the Gupta fake encounter which I had followed in those days. So I decided to raise the issue in my columns”, 4 PM editor Sanjay Sharma told The Wire in Lucknow.
