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The Ahmedabad city police on Thursday filed a 1,684-page chargesheet in the ISKCON bridge accident case, where a Jaguar driver mowed down nine people and injured 13 others on July 20. The police have listed 191 witnesses in the case and confessional statements of eight of them form part of the chargesheet.
Tathya Patel (20), the driver of the Jaguar, and his father Pragnesh Patel (44) have been charged under Indian Penal Code sections 279 (rash driving), 337, 338 (hurt and grievous hurt caused by rash and negligent act), 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 308 (attempt to commit culpable homicide), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace), 506 (2) (criminal intimidation), 114 (abetment), and 188 (disobedience to order promulgated by public servant) as well as under Motor Vehicle Act sections 177 (breaking traffic laws), 184 (dangerous driving) and 134 (b).
Although the chargesheet has been filed, the investigation in the case continues under provisions of Code of Criminal Procedure section 173 (8) (power of the police to conduct further investigation, after laying the final report). Pragnesh is more specifically facing charges of criminal intimidation at the site of the offence.
City police commissioner Prem Vir Singh, addressing a press conference, said that among the pieces of evidence being relied on in the chargesheet was a report of the event data recorder (EDR) system of the Jaguar as received from the company and a video of the crash as recorded by an eyewitness and validated by a forensic science laboratory (FSL).
Among those arraigned as eyewitnesses is a biker who captured the crash on a body-worn camera, and the video footage captured, too, has been made part of the chargesheet, Singh confirmed to The Indian Express.
Singh said, “The chargesheet includes RTO details on the Jaguar and also evidence to identify that it was indeed Tathya Patel who was driving the car, including the DNA test of the accused, which was positive affirming his identity. We have also included evidence of the driver’s past record and the old habit of rash driving in the charge sheet.”
Tathya is also an accused in a case booked in Gandhinagar’s Santej police station after the same Jaguar rammed into a temple’s pillar and caused a part of its roof to crash in the early hours of January 1. An FIR in this regard was registered on January 25.
“We have sufficient scientific evidence that the car was speeding. We also investigated the aspect of visibility with experts from AMC (Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation) and FSL and the investigation so far reveals that there was no visibility issue. Visibility was perfectly fine,” said Singh.
An officer associated with the investigation said that 14 pieces of documentary evidence, including “FSL reports, expert reports, EDR report, postmortem notes of the nine deceased and RTO reports” had been relied on.
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