NEW DELHI: The CBI was today forced to retract before the Supreme Court its move for the discharge of two of the St. Kitts accused K.L. Verma, an Enforcement Directorate Official and Larry J. Kolb, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi son-in-law, after the agency was given a dressing down for attempting to tell a trial court yesterday that there was no evidence to implicate them in the sensational forgery. “Mr. Attorney General, at the beginning we thought that news reports to this effect appearing in the newspapers today were incorrect. But now we are constrained to observe that the CBI’s stand in this regard is indefensible”, a division bench comprising Justice B.N. Kirpal observed during the hearing of a public interest petition seeking monitoring of the investigations in the St. Kitts case.
As soon as the proceedings began, Anil Diwan told the court that he was disturbed by news reports today that the Central Bureau of Investigation had sought discharge of the two accused in the case without informing the apex court as earlier directed. Attorney General Ashok Desai, appearing for the CBI at first tried to defend the agency’s stand in the matter saying that the plea for discharge did not mean that it was asking the court to acquit the two accused. Moreover, he said that the application of the CBI was a police report under Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and not a discharge in the right sense of the term. The CB] denied that it had sought the charge of two of the accused. But the investigating agency did not only after the court admonished it, particularly its Director Joginder Singh, for not being.
Article extracted from this publication >> October 2, 1996
