A court on Monday pulled up the Delhi Police for clubbing 22 complaints in connection with a 2020 Northeast Delhi riots case without any legal basis. Additional Sessions Judge Pulastya Pramachala also rejected the investigating officer's application seeking permission to conduct further investigation and urged the station house officer (SHO) to take back all the additional complaints and register a separate case. "This court cannot be a party to such an illegal approach of the investigating agency and hence, this application is rejected and disallowed," said ASJ Pramachala. Judge Pramachala also pointed out that such directions had to be passed on previous occasions by the Court. He added it was expected that rather than awaiting repeated directions from the court in each case, the investigating agency should have filed separate cases for the additional complaints instead of clubbing them. Calling the exercise “not legal”, the court said it was “disturbing” that the investigating agency already announced its conclusion with respect to the 22 complaints based on hearsay, which wasn’t admissible. The court also noted that some witnesses failed to disclose their source of information to the police for “reasons best known to them”. ASJ Pramachala also observed there wasn’t concrete evidence to even confirm the exact time and date of these incidents adding that the accused were connected with all these incidents without any evidence. The original complaint was lodged at Gokulpuri Police Station in 2020 at the behest of a complaint filed by a man called Rizwan. On Friday, the same court had rapped the Delhi Police for clubbing 39 complaints in the two First Information Reports (FIRs) against three people accused of rioting and unlawful assembly during the 2020 Delhi riots.
