A Pune court on Thursday rejected the bail pleas of six persons in connection with the Kalyaninagar Porsche crash on May 19 that killed two persons, reported Bar and Bench.
The parents of the 17-year-old driver who rammed his car into the victims’ motorbike allegedly while under the influence of alcohol were among those denied bail.
The six persons have been accused of tampering with evidence in the case.
On May 28, the police said they had found that doctors at the Sassoon General Hospital had manipulated the minor’s blood samples collected after the accident. They said it had been swapped with the blood sample of his mother and sent to a forensic lab to check for alcohol content.
On July 26, the Pune Police filed a preliminary chargesheet against seven persons in the case, including the parents of the minor, Sassoon Hospital doctors Ajay Taware and Shrihari Halnor and two persons who acted as middlemen, identified as Ashpak Makandar and Amar Gaikwad.
The doctors and the middlemen are accused of conspiring to replace the minor’s blood sample with his mother’s in return for money.
At the time of the accident, Taware was the head of the forensic medicine department at Sassoon Hospital while Halnor was the casualty medical officer.
Makandar and Gaikwad allegedly acted as the middlemen between the minor’s father and the doctors. The seventh accused person in the case is Atul Ghatkamble, who was a staffer at the hospital’s morgue. He did not apply for bail.
On Thursday, a court of Additional Sessions Judge UM Mudholkar rejected the bail applications of the six persons noting that CCTV footage and call data records the alleged crime, reported The Indian Express.
“Perusal of the entire charge­sheet, which runs into almost 900 pages, clearly goes to show that even before the splashes of blood lying on the road of the victims had dried, the tampering with the evidence commenced and even concluded to a large extent, with the help of monetary influence or otherwise at odd hours of midnight,” the court said.
The court noted that “there is a sure chance that [evidence] would be tampered by one way or another by [the six persons] utilising the same modus” if they were granted bail.
The court said that to prevent such a situation, the only option would be to reject their bail pleas.
On July 3, a Pune court granted bail to the minor’s grandfather and father in a separate case pertaining to the abduction and wrongful confinement of their family driver. They allegedly tried to coerce the driver into claiming that he was behind the wheel of the Porsche when the crash occurred.
However, the minor’s father remained in jail as he was also accused in the evidence tampering case.
On June 25, the Bombay High Court granted bail to the minor, ordering his release from an observation home and into the care of his aunt.