Pune Porsche crash: Mother of accused teen walks out of jail days after SC grants interim bail
Pune (PTI): The mother of a 17-year-old boy involved in the Pune Porsche crash, in which two persons lost their lives, walked out of jail on Saturday, four days after the Supreme Court granted her interim bail.
She is the first among the 10 accused arrested in the alleged blood sample-swapping case to be released on bail.
The others in custody include the teenager's father, Sassoon Hospital doctors Ajay Taware and Shrihari Halnor, hospital staffer Atul Ghatkamble, two middlemen, and three others.
A Porsche allegedly driven by a 17-year-old boy in an inebriated state fatally knocked down two IT professionals on a two-wheeler in Pune's Kalyani Nagar in the early hours of May 19 last year.
The boy's mother is accused of swapping her blood sample with that of her son to conceal his inebriation at the time of the accident.
While granting the mother interim bail, the Supreme Court had directed a Pune court to set the bail conditions. Accordingly, the district and sessions court heard arguments from both sides on Friday.
Special public prosecutor Shishir Hiray represented the state, while advocates Angad Gill and Dhvani Shah appeared for the woman.
Advocate Hiray said, "We sought conditions such as barring her from staying in Pune district, a passport seizure, mandatory police station attendance, and keeping her mobile location on at all times."
Additional sessions judge Amol Shinde, however, rejected the prosecution's plea to restrict her from staying in Pune but accepted other conditions.
The defence lawyers opposed the condition of her staying out of Pune, citing her husband's custody and the need for her presence in the city to assist in the legal proceedings. They also objected to the proposed Rs 5 lakh surety and daily police station visits.
"We argued that since the chargesheet has been filed and no recovery is pending from her, such strict conditions are unwarranted," the defence counsel said.
The court accepted the arguments and imposed standard bail conditions, including a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh, submission of her passport to the investigating officer, mandatory mobile tower location sharing, and a ban on leaving India without court permission.
The court has also barred the woman from disclosing her identity for three months and asked her to report to the police station every Wednesday.
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Gurugram Police arrest BJP Yuva Morcha member for spreading fake murder story on social media
New Delhi: Gurugram Police have arrested BJP Yuva Morcha member Hariom Mishra, for allegedly spreading a fabricated and communally sensitive story on social media about the murder of a college student in Gurugram.
Mishra who is also known as Shaurya Mishra had shared a collage of four photographs on his X handle earlier this month. He claimed that a 24-year-old college student, identified as Nikita Agarwal, had been murdered by her classmate Arif Khan in Gurugram. In the post, he alleged that the woman was blackmailed, forced into prostitution, gangraped, and eventually killed. He also claimed that Arif dumped her body in a forest. The claims were presented as being based on police sources.
The post went viral and garnering over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles across X, Facebook and Instagram. A verification of the claims revealed that no such incident had taken place in Gurugram. A search of credible news reports showed no record of any such murder. The police said this news would have inevitably attracted media attention if it were true.
On December 11, Gurugram Police publicly refuted the claims through their official X handle. They stated that the information which was being circulated was completely false. The police warned that legal action would be taken against those spreading misinformation. Despite the warning, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued any clarification.
Police in Gurugram confirmed Mishra's arrest on December 16. The police said a FIR was filed after he continued to spread false information about the alleged murder of a Hindu woman by Muslim man. Police said Mishra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district, is now being investigated.
Gurugram Police spokesperson Sandeep Singh told The Print that the accused had deliberately misrepresented facts and used objectionable content to spread hatred along religious lines. “Such posts can create serious disturbances in society, and the police take these matters very seriously,” he said.
A reverse image search conducted by fact-checkers at Alt News, revealed that the photographs used in the viral post were unrelated to the claims, while two of the images were traced to a Pinterest account belonging to influencer Maulik Chopra and another image was sourced from an Instagram post by influencer Shivam Thakur featuring a woman named Deepanshi Rawat. The fourth image was found on an unrelated Instagram page. The images depicted different individuals and had no connection to any crime.
Police said they are also investigating Mishra’s motive behind sharing the false and provocative content.
