Quoting the prosecution’s inability to “prove the case beyond reasonable doubt”, a court in Porbandar, Gujarat, acquitted ex-IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt in a 1997 custodial torture case on Saturday (December 7), according to media report. Bhatt is currently lodged in Rajkot central jail in Gujarat after he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019 for a 1990 custodial death case, and for 20 years in jail this year for a 1996 case related to dragging a lawyer in a false case.
In year 2013, an FIR was registered against Bhatt and a police constable based on a complaint by Naran Jadhav, one of 22 people accused in a 1994 arms recovery case. Jadhav blamed Bhatt, who was the superintendent of police of Porbandar in 1997, of physically and mentally torturing him that year during police custody in order to extract confession from him in a Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act and Arms Act case.
