1999 Delhi hit-and-run case

Sanjeev Nanda (born 1978) is the grandson of an ex-Chief of Naval Staff-turned businessman from New Delhi who is the prime accused to have run over and killed six people, including three policemen, in a drunken state when he drove his BMW car at high speed through a police checkpoint.

He has been convicted of the culpable homicide (under section 304, but not for rash and negligence driving) by a Delhi court today and will be sentenced tomorrow. He can get a maximum of 10 years in jail. Manik Kapoor the co-accused was acquited.

The incident occurred at 4:50 AM early morning of January 10, 1999. After running through the policemen, he allegedly stopped the car to check the damage, saw people under the car, and according to the prosecution, at this point co-passenger Manik Kapoor said: ‘‘Let’s go,’’ and they quickly drove away. The car was later cleaned up by servants at a friend's house.

Sanjeev Nanda's father, Lt. Commander Suresh Nanda (ex-Indian Navy), heads the arms supply firm Crown Corporation. His grandfather S.M. Nanda, was once India's Chief of Naval Staff; after retirement he joined the arms trading business. Sanjeev Nanda is a management graduate from INSEAD and Wharton.

Subsequently Sanjeev and five others were tried in a high profile court case that dragged on for many years. Ultimately the court did not find any of the witnesses reliable and the defense was able to make the case that it was perhaps a truck and not the BMW that had caused the deaths. All the accused were released, resulting in a sharp drop in public confidence in the legal system, since it was widely believed that the witnesses had been bought off.

Sunil Kulkarni is a witness that didn't turn hostile in a Delhi Additional sessions court. [1] The case is continuing in Delhi at present.

Independently of progress in this case, in March 2008, Sanjeev Nanda and his father were arrested in Mumbai in connection with the Barak Missile Scandal.

The BMW hit-and-run case

The incident appears to have unfolded as follows.

Sanjeev Nanda was returning from a late night party in Gurgaon with friend Manik Kapoor. Both were in their early twenties and came from influential business families - Manik's father Sudhir Kapoor runs a thriving export business was one of the closest to the Nanda Family. Sanjiv had apparently been instructed by his parents not to drive that night, but was at the wheel anyway. There was a police checkpoint on Lodhi Road and it appears that the constable may have challenged the car, though it is also possible that the car was going so fast that it was out of control. In any event, it is alleged that Sanjeev's BMW crashed through all the people at the police checkpoint, immediately killing two constables - Rajan Kumar (25) (of 86th Battalion of the CRPF), Ram Raj (38) of Delhi Home Guard, and two others - Abdul Nasir (30) and Gulab (32), who were apparently being interrogated.

Another policeman, Peru Lal (40) of the Delhi Home Guard, along with Mehendi Hassan, died later in hospital. The seventh victim, Manoj (32), survived, but is untraceable today.

The car was then driven to Siddharth Gupta's house in Golf Links, where Siddharth's father Rajiv Gupta, who heads the finance firm Motor General Finance, instructed watchman Bhola Nath and driver Shyam Singh Rana to clean the bumpers and bonnet of the car of the blood and vestiges of the victims. Subsequently the police charged these three with destroying evidence.

A few days later, a witness Sunil Kulkarni, came forward to describe the scene. At the time of the crash, he was on his way to the railway station. He deposed as follows on Jan 16, 1999:

"They were driving very fast. The car went to the side, crushing two people. A few others were thrown away. The driver got out and looked at the damage done to the car. Then the other person in the car came out and looked behind the car. Then they quickly drove off. I came to the police on the 15th because of my guilty conscience."

NDTV sting operation

The prominent criminal lawers involved in the case were R.K. Anand and I.U. Khan. NDTV carried out a sting operation in which they were caught on camera offering money to Sunil Kulkarni. Later the Delhi High Court barred the advocates from practising for four months.

Thus prosecution droped Mumbai-based Sunil Kulkarni condemning his as a won-over man.

The investigation

The vehicle's broken registration plate was found on the scene the next morning. A 100-yard stretch near the police checkpoint was strewn with body parts and severed limbs amid pools of blood. Preliminary investigations revealed that the car would have been going at 140 km/h when it hit the victims.

Within a few hours of the incident, Inspector Jagdish Pandey of the Police Control Room of Delhi Police was able to trace the BMW by trailing the oil leak from the accident-spot to Rajiv Gupta's garage. They found the one-month old car, purchased in his sister Sonali Nanda's name, with foreign number plates, which had not been registered in India. Attempts to clean it were still in progress. Sanjeev and his friends were arrested, but his clothes, and those of the others who helped clean the car, were never found. When Sanjeev and his friends were first charged with Culpable homicide in court, a gaggle of Delhi's elite descended on Patiala House courts, including ex-Admiral Nanda himself.

The Witnesses

• Manoj Malik
• Harishankar

The trial

During the trial, the only survivor, Manoj, said that it might have been a truck that hit them. Since the other six witnesses were dead, Manoj was the only voice. It is widely believed that he had been paid off, and has mysteriously disappeared thereafter. Another witness, Sunil Kulkarni had volunteered to have seen the incident, but the elite defence team was able to discredit him and he was portrayed as having been "put up" by the Delhi Police.

In Sanjeev Nanda's testimony (in 92 questions over 14 pages), he told Judge S.L. Bayana that he was not driving the car and was not the car's owner. He said it was his sister's car and he had nothing to do with the accident.

Sanjeev Nanda spent a few months in jail but was released on bail in May 1999. He was set a surety of a Rs 45 crore (USD 9 million), subsequently reduced to Rs. 15 crore (USD 3 million). Sanjeev, it turned out, was a British national. On 2nd September, 2008, Sanjeev Nanda was convicted by a Delhi court for mowing down six persons in the nine-year-old BMW hit-and-run case and can face a ten-year prison term.

The BMW case joins a long list of similar cases. A few years back, Puru Raj Kumar, the son of Bollywood director Raj Kumar, had run over two pavement dwellers. He had been fined Rs. 35000 (about USD 1000).

Timeline

1999

• 10th January, A speeding BMW drives through a police check-point in Delhi and kills 6 people.

2007

• 18th May, key whitness Sunil Kulkarni says Sanjeev Nanda was 1 of the 3 people in the BMW [2]
• 1st June, Sanjeev Nanda says in court that he was not in the BMW [3]

2008 march

• Sanjeev and his father suresh nanda was arrested from a mumbai hotel for allegedly bribing an income tax official. Sureash nanda was also once accused by CBI for puchasing barak missiles from israel 8 years ago. Both were bailed out in that case.

2008

• September 2nd 2008, Sanjeev Nanda was convicted by a Delhi court for mowing down six persons in the nine-year-old BMW hit-and-run case and can face a ten-yea prison term.
• September 5th 2008, Sanjeev Nanda gets five year jail term for mowing down six persons in the nine-year-old BMW hit-and-run case

Nanda Family's Corruption history

Following the incident there was considerable debate about the Nanda family and the source of its wealth. One year after the incident, the Tehelka tapes revealed possible influence Lt-Cmdr Suresh Nanda and Admiral SM Nanda may have had with the Indian Ministry of Defence in swinging deals. In these tapes, the reporter is posing as a representative of the fictional large arms supplier West End. At one point, the Samata Party national treasurer RK Jain is trying to convince Tehelka about his prowess in swinging deals. He mentions how in the first defence deal that he was involved in as the party treasurer, Suresh Nanda of Crown Corporation had paid Samata Party Rs 1 crore to swing the Rs 250-crore (USD 60 million) order for Armoured Recovery Vehicles (ARV) in favour of a Slovakian company.

• Samata Party treasurer R.K. Jain: "Nanda approached me. Czechoslovakia's price was the lowest, second Slovakian, third was the Poland."
• Tehelka: "Haan, Haan."
• R.K. Jain: "He said, 'I will give you one crore rupees in advance'."
• Tehelka: "Okay."
• R.K. Jain: "You get disapproved the last one. Czechoslovakia because they are so lower that we cannot match their price."
• Tehelka: "Okay."
• R.K. Jain: "If you can push him out. Delegation is going on to the... delegation has been ordered to go to Czechoslovakia. Stop this delegation, and technically reject this company. Here are the documents."
• Tehelka: "Hmm."
• R.K.Jain: "By which it's proved that this company is closed for the last two years. They will start only after getting this order."
• Tehelka: "Yeah, yeah."
• R.K. Jain: "I will give one crore rupees. And I will give you... if they are technically disapproved, then you are my agent."
• Tehelka: "Yeah."
• R.K. Jain: "For this particular... perks... and I will give you so much of commission."
• Tehelka: "Okay."
• R.K. Jain: "I said, 'Fine.' He gave me the correspondence. I took the correspondence to George."

(the then Defence minister George Fernandes was from Samata Party)

• Tehelka: "Hmm."
• R.K. Jain: "And he said, 'All right, I'll reject it.' He is a very intelligent man."...
• Tehelka: Okay, it is manipulated.
• R.K. Jain: He wrote straight away on the file himself. He never goes and orders to a Joint Secretary. He wrote it himself, and sent the file back. Nanda gave me one crore rupees. He called me, "Yes, Mr. Jain, the file has come down. Like you know George…"
• Tehelka: Yeah, yeah.

Jain also said that he had received another Rs 1 crore for the Samata Party from Suresh Nanda to help swing the contract for an air-to-air and surface-to-surface missile system for the Indian Navy. Nanda was an agent for the Israeli Barak missile system.

These tapes were the result of a clandestine sting operation and are not admissible as evidence in court. However, the Central Bureau of Investigation has arrested R.K. Jain in February 2006 in connection with its own investigations spurred by the Tehelka tapes.

See also

• Jessica Lall, a Delhi-based Model shot in a bar in front of dozens of witnesses by then-politician's son Manu Sharma. Initially, the accused was acquitted after witnesses turn hostile in a low level court, but was subsequently given a lifer in the Delhi High Court, following testimony of a key witness Bina Ramani, who did not turn hostile. Hostile witnesses such as Shayan Munshi are being tried for prejury for turing hostile in court.
• Priyadarshini Mattoo Law student raped and killed by a classmate stalker who is the son of a high ranking police officer. Detectives were influenced by the policeman to go easy on the killer, and thus the case was transferred to the CBI. Murderer found guilty after dogged pursuit of justice by the media and the victim's family, and sentenced to death.

• Satyendra Dubey

• Shanmughan Manjunath

External links

• Sukumar Muralidharan (Frontline) on Defence corruption

The Indian Criminal system is Broken as criminal gets only 5years, and wonder what happen to Rajiv Gupta since he is also part of criminal for advising to wash the evidence. Once again these are VERY RICH people wonder how much Judge got paid. If this was a middle class person I am sure he will be in jail for life.