New Delhi: Real estate barons Sushil and Gopal Ansal have been denied suspension of the seven-year jail sentence handed by the Delhi High Court. The sentence had been handed for tampering with evidence in the case connected to the Uphaar cinema fire in 1997, in which 59 people lost their lives.
Justice Subramonium Prasad said the court has rejected the applications of the Ansal brothers. Meanwhile, the court allowed the application for the suspension of sentence of another convict Anoop Singh Karayat, The Indian Express reported.
In its judgment convicting the accused, the court last year observed that the accused while facing trial in the case destroyed critical documents “which were capable of proving their complicity in the said case”.
The court said the accused destroyed the documents “through a meticulous planning in order to escape punishment by scuttling trial process and as such fiddled with our judicial system with great impunity”.
On November 8 last year, a lower court sentenced Sushil and Gopal Ansal to seven years in prison for tampering with evidence in the case. They were convicted under Sections 201 (tampering of evidence), 120B (punishment of criminal conspiracy) and 409 (criminal breach of trust by a public servant) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) on October 8 that year.
