New Delhi, May 13: A court here has awarded jail terms of varying periods to nine persons for looting Rs 2.01 crore belonging to the ICICI Bank after waylaying an armoured cash delivery van nearly nine years ago. Additional Sessions Judge S C Rajan awarded seven years rigorous imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 32,000 each on four of the convicts — Jatinder, Dharamvir, Jaswant and Jagbir Singh.
The fast track court also sentenced five others — Sanjay Kumar, Angrez, Vijender, Dalbir Singh and lone woman accused Subdri Devi — to one-year jail term each for keeping the cash and helping the main culprits in destroying evidence. The court, however, acquitted six others for want of evidence while one accused died during the trial.
An armoured delivery van of M/s Brinks Arya Private Ltd, a Delhi-based company involved in ferrying cash for various private and PSU banks, reached the Reserve Bank of India to collect Rs 2.01 crore in cash on the morning of July 23, 2001. The manager of ICICI Bank of Connaught Place branch had given a cheque to Madanpal, complainant in the case, to collect the cash from the RBI. Soon after receiving the cash, van driver Dharamvir and one of the gunmen Jaswant forcibly took the vehicle towards Gurgaon, the court found.
The duo were then joined by other accused who together looted the cash and fled in their private vehicle after locking other staff of the company. The complainant managed to come out of the vehicle after a few hours and informed the police who subsequently arrested 16 people in the case.
Ninety-four witnesses, including Sunil Malhotra, manager of the ICICI Bank, had testified in the case. Four key accused, involved in the robbery, pleaded guilty during the trial and requested a lenient sentence on the ground that they were first-time offenders.
The court rejected the plea of other accused that they deserved to be acquitted as most of the prosecution witnesses have given contradictory statements. “I have found some minor contradictions in the testimonies of some of the witnesses but they are of trivial nature and can be primarily due to lapse of time,” the Judge said.
—-PTI