New Delhi:
The Supreme Court has ruled that an interview given to a private news channel by the software engineer who was with a 23-year-medical student when she was gang-raped in a moving bus on December 16 last year, cannot be used as evidence in the trial.
The top court has put aside a Delhi High Court order which had allowed the use of a CD of the interview, telecast on January 4 this year, as evidence. The Delhi Police had appealed against the High Court order, submitting that the TV interview was inadmissible.
The Dellhi High Court had on March 7 allowed the plea of two of the six men accused in the gang-rape - Ram Singh, who allegedly committed suicide in Tihar jail, and his brother Mukesh against a trial court order which disallowed them from exhibiting the CD as evidence.
On December 16 last year, the young woman was brutally gang-raped and assaulted in a moving bus in south Delhi by six men. She died in a Singapore hospital on December 29. The male friend who was with her through the gruesome incident and was also attacked, is the only eye-witness in the case.
The survivng adult men being tried by a fast-track court in the case are Mukesh, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Akshay Singh. The sixth accused, who has been declared a minor, is being tried by the Juvenile Justice Board.
The trial court had framed charges against the five adult accused under various sections of the IPC for gangrape and murder, apart from other charges. Ram Singh was found hanging in his Tihar Jail cell on March 11.