Dileep, the Malayalam actor accused in two ongoing cases, has now approached the Kerala High Court with a plea to quash the second case against him, in which he is accused to have conspired with five others to kill police officials who investigated the actor assault crime of 2017. Dileep is an accused and alleged to be the mastermind of the actor assault case.
In his plea to quash the conspiracy case – filed in January this year – Dileep has called the FIR against him "vindictive, ill-motivated, pre-determined and malafide," and executed with "oblique motives," reports Live Law.
Advocate Philip T Varghese, filing the plea for Dileep, has repeated the claims made by the accused's lawyer Raman Pillai in his earlier anticipatory bail plea hearing. Both lawyers claimed that the police were trying to fabricate evidence for the 2017 actor assault case by filing the fresh FIR against Dileep.
The trial of the assault case has been going on for more than two years at a sessions court in Kochi.
Dileep's new plea also says that the FIR was in violation of section 154 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc) – information relating to the commission of a cognisable offence – and that there is no material to "attract the offences in the FIR." The statements made by director Balachandra Kumar – which has led to the new FIR – were false, claims the plea.
If the FIR cannot be quashed, Dileep recommends the investigation to be transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Three years earlier, Dileep had similarly asked for CBI probe of the actor assault case, which the high court had then dismissed. Later, in January 2020, he also made a plea to remove his name from the list of accused in the assault case.
The abduction and assault of a woman actor in Kerala happened five years ago when she was travelling in a car in Kochi. Within days, a man called Pulsar Suni was arrested in the case and charged as the main accused. Dileep, the eighth accused, was arrested months later for allegedly masterminding the attack on his fellow actor as an act of personal vengeance.
However, he later came out on bail and had submitted a number of petitions and pleas which delayed the trial in the case for a long time. It finally began in December 2019 and is still going on at the trial court.
(Published in an arrangement with The News Minute.)
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