Shashwati Chowdhury
Published on: July 21 2022 at 16:44 IST
In May of this year, the Uddhav Thackeray government appealed the Supreme Court’s order to hand over to the CBI five FIRs registered against the former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh. The petition was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Wednesday (CBI).
The review petition moved by the state government against the March 24 order was dismissed by a Bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and MM Sundresh. It also denied the state’s request to hear its lawyer present in open court. Review petitions are often decided in judge’s chamber, without the use of oral arguments.
The top court granted the senior police officer’s request on March 24 to transfer the probe into all criminal cases lodged by the Maharashtra police against Param Bir Singh to the CBI, asserting that a fair probe is necessary to regain public confidence in the system. The senior police officer said that he was the alleged target of a witch hunt.
The Bench further directed the state to turn over to the CBI all documents related to the five first information reports (FIRs) filed against Singh. It also mandated that all future FIRs related to Singh’s tenure as the commissioner of the Mumbai Police be handed over to the central agency.
In 2021, the National Investigation Agency named a Mumbai police officer, Sachin Waze, as the main accused in the Antilla bomb scare case. As a result of Singh’s handling of the matter, Waze was moved. He subsequently wrote a letter to Maharashtra’s chief minister making his allegations against Deshmukh .
Deshmukh is now behind bars in connection to the cases launched for alleged corruption and money laundering by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate.
After being transferred and having lawsuits filed against him, Singh went months without communicating, sparking speculations that he had fled India. Singh eventually appeared before the Supreme Court last year, at the court’s insistence, and was granted protection from arrest by the Mumbai Police.