NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Wednesday extended till September 27 the judicial custody of the woman who drove the BMW car involved in a crash that left a senior finance ministry official dead and his wife injured in Dhaula Kuan here.
Judicial magistrate Ankit Garg extended the judicial custody of Gaganpreet Kaur, 38, after she was presented in the court. Senior advocate Ramesh Gupta, appearing for Kaur, moved an application for preservation of the accident’s CCTV footage, for which the court issued a notice and posted the matter for hearing on Thursday.
Gupta argued that an accident case had been converted into a case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder under Section 105 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). He said that the erstwhile IPC section corresponding to it was Section 304, which had two parts; the first sub-section provided for maximum imprisonment of life, while the second part had no such punishment.
“The FIR was registered 10 hours after the investigating officer (IO) arrested me. They (police) are saying that Section 304 was invoked as the injured were taken to a faraway hospital. Both families are aggrieved. They (the couple) have two children aged 5 and 7; they were also injured along with the husband,” the advocate said in his arguments.
He said that the DCP concerned should be made a witness in the case, as he was the first person to meet the two witnesses who narrated the sequence of the accident to him. Gupta said that according to the sequence of events, the car also hit a bus and the bus also needed to be seized.
The complainant’s counsel countered that Makkar was not seriously injured and knowingly delayed medical help by insisting the van take victims to a hospital 20 km away, alleging malafide intent.
The court has listed the matter for further hearing on Saturday.