Tahir Hussain, who was a Councillor of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the then Newton Delhi area, has filed an appeal before the Delhi High Court against his conviction and life sentence in the murder of an Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer Ankit Sharma during the riots in the Northeast Delhi area in 2020.
In a statement made through his advocate, Rajiv Mohan, Hussain has questioned the authenticity of the investigation against him, which was from the beginning, to blame the activist, in view of the widespread anger following the death of Sharma. His appeal challenges the July 13, 2019, trial court’s conviction order and the July 31, 2019, sentencing order.
The appeal says the FIR was ante-dated and ante-timed, and it was based on a bogus complaint and that a proper probe could not take place till Hussain’s arrest in another case. It also alleges that witnesses were planted and that his defence statements were twisted and strong evidence against him ignored.
During the trial the court had termed Tahir Hussain’s murder “savage” and “relentless” and had found him and four other people guilty of the death. Six other persons were acquitted.
Hussain was sentenced to life imprisonment with another four on July 31, including Nazim and Kasim. The court’s assessment of the horrific nature of the crime and its category of “conditions” describing the crime put it in the “rarest of the rare” category in light of what it has called its “extraordinary” brutality, but it rejected the prosecution’s death penalty plea for it, saying the chance of the convict’s reform had not been excluded.
Hussain’s appeal is expected to come up before the Delhi High Court next week.