The CBI on Saturday filed its final report on investigation into a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case, allegedly involving senior Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, to a court here as members of the community demanded extreme punishment for him.
"Hang the culprits" rent the air outside the court complex when the CBI filed its report into the investigation in a sealed cover before metropolitan magistrate Ram Lal Meena in the afternoon.
HS Phoolka, senior counsel for Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee, strongly opposed the CBI plea that the matter should be put for further hearing after April 20.
The court allowed his plea and fixed the hearing for April two.
Hundreds of Sikhs gathered outside the Karkardooma courts here since morning and raised slogans against Tytler and other senior Congress leaders like Sajjan Kumar and Kamal Nath for their alleged involvement in the riots.
All the three leaders are Congress nominees for different Lok Sabha seats in coming elections. While Tytler's case is still pending, Kumar's acquittal in one case has been appealed against in the Delhi High Court. No case was, however, registered against Kamal Nath.
The victims demanded "capital punishment" for the culprits. The members of All India Riots Victims Action Committee and other associations demonstrated with placards and banners carrying pictures of the Congress leaders.
During the proceedings, Phoolka said "it has already been 20 years since the incident. Even now the CBI wants to delay it."
The CBI had also recorded the statement of California-based Jasbir Singh who was earlier declared by it as "untraceable". Besides Singh, it had also recorded statements of nine others.
The probe agency had on September 29, 2007, sought to close the case against Tytler.
But the court had on December 19, 2007, asked it to file the investigation report after Singh, the witness, surfaced and expressed his willingness to depose against the Congress leader.
The case against Tytler relates to an incident on November one, 1984, when a mob had set afire Gurudwara Pulbangash killing three persons in the riots that had broken out after the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Singh had told the Nanavati Commission on August 31, 2000, that "he had overheard Tytler rebuking his men on the night of November three, 1984 ... for nominal killing of Sikh in his constitutency."
