Uphaar Fire Tragedy: Delhi court awards 7-year jail term to Ansal brothers in evidence tampering case

59 people were killed in the fire that broke out in Delhi's Uphaar cinema on June 13, 1997.

A Delhi court on November 8 announced a seven-year jail term for convicted businessmen Sushil Ansal and Gopal Ansal in the 1997 Uphaar Cinema fire tragedy case.

The sentence was announced by the Patiala House Court in a case related to tampering of evidence. The court also ordered the police to take the Ansal brothers into immediate custody.

Apart from a seven-year prison term, the court has also imposed a fine of Rs 2.25 crore each on both the convicts.

The Ansal brothers, a former court staff Dinesh Chand Sharma and two others -- P P Batra and Anoop Singh were convicted by Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Pankaj Sharma on October 8 this year.

The judge held that the guilt of the Ansal brothers, Sharma, Batra, and Singh was “proved beyond any reasonable doubt” for the offence of criminal conspiracy, causing disappearance of evidence of offence and criminal breach of trust by the public servant.

The court had said that the convicts destructed critical documents which were capable of proving their complicity in the main case, “making this time the justice dispensation system as the victim.”

“They tampered/obliterated/tom/defaced some hand-picked documents of the said case through a meticulous planning in order to escape punishment by scuttling trial process and as such fiddled with our judicial system with great impunity,” the judge had noted.

Notably, a total of 59 people died of asphyxia when a fire broke out in Uphaar Cinema, during the screening of Hindi film Border, on June 13, 1997. In the stampede that followed, over 100 people were left injured.

(With PTI inputs)