NEW DELHI, Jan 13: In a surprise U-turn, Shankar Mishra, the man accused of urinating on an elderly woman co-passenger on an Air India flight, told a Delhi court today he did not commit the offensive act and that the alleged victim seems to have urinated in her seat.
The claim by his lawyer, made for the first time since the sordid event unfolded on an Air India New York-New Delhi flight on November 26 last year, flies in the face of denunciation of the accused by some of the co-passengers and even a string of WhatsApp exchanges he had with the victim woman which suggested the unsavoury incident indeed took place.
The counsel for the accused made the submission before Additional Sessions Judge Harjyot Singh Bhalla while arguing against a Delhi Police petition seeking revision of an order passed by a magisterial court denying police his custodial interrogation.
The judge disposed of the application, saying the submissions made before him did not seem to have been made in front of the Metropolitan Magistrate. He said police can approach the magisterial court with its application afresh.
“I’m not the accused. There must be someone else. It seems she herself urinated. She was suffering from some disease related to prostate which several ‘kathak dancers’ seem to suffer from. It was not me. The seating system was such that no one could go to her seat.
“Her seat could only be approached from behind, and in any case the urine could not reach to seat’s front area. Also, the passenger sitting behind the complainant did not make any such complaint,” the defence advocate told the judge.
Senior advocate Ramesh Gupta, appearing for Mishra, accused police and the press of turning the case into a joke.
“The first complaint was made by complainant a day after the incident. What was the claim? To refund. That was done by the airline. The police and press have turned this case into a joke… Was this case so big, was it a murder case that they reached Bangalore to arrest me and called me an absconder. He was removed from job,” the defence counsel said.(PTI)
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