The Punjab and Haryana High Court has stayed trial court proceedings in the alleged lynching of 17-year-old Junaid Khan and issued notice to the Haryana government and the CBI on a plea for a probe by the agency, The Tribune reported. The Bench of Justices Mahesh Grover and Raj Shekhar Attri fixed January 11 for the next hearing.
The petition had been made by Junaid’s father Jalaluddin, after a single judge recently dismissed his earlier plea for a CBI probe into the case. Junaid was allegedly stabbed by a mob which also hurled communal slurs at him on a Mathura-bound train this June.
The trial court was scheduled to hear the case on December 12. Earlier, another single-judge bench of the high court had ordered that proceedings in the case be concluded within five months because there was “every likelihood of prosecution witnesses being put in jeopardy”.
Claiming that Junaid’s killing was “motivated by deep-rooted communal hatred”, Jalaluddin had requested for setting aside the order of November 27 that dismissed his plea for a CBI investigation. “The true nature of the crime has been subjected to a cover-up. The conduct of the named accused and others as a lynching mob has been concealed. It has been projected as if the occurrence was sudden without any element of the perpetrators having acted as in conspiracy or unlawful assembly,” Jalaluddin’s plea reportedly said.
The November 27 single judge’s order had said that “during the course of the hearing, the complainant has not been able to show that there are serious flaws in the investigation, which would lead to the conclusion that the same is shoddy or tainted. Besides, there is nothing to show that the incident has any national or international ramifications. It is, thus, not a fit case to exercise extraordinary power to hand over the investigation to the CBI”.
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