Hearing on the ‘Suspicious Death’ of Judge Loya Deferred for a Week

The Government of Maharashtra has submitted all the relevant documents regarding the death of Judge Loya and the Court had directed them to submit a copy to the petitioners. Senior Advocate Harish Salve objected to this direction on the grounds of confidentiality, stating that the materials should not be published in the media. The Division Bench in Court Room 10 stated that the petitioners should have all the information. This matter will be taken up after seven days, but the Bench, however, did not assign any date for the hearing. The journalist’s petition which started the controversy over the death of Judge Loya stated that there were several contradictions relating to the death of Judge Loya and that the Court must pass directions for an independent probe.

Apart from this petition which is before the Supreme Court of India, the Bombay Lawyers’ Association had submitted a similar petition seeking an inquiry commission headed by a retired Supreme Court Judge. Last month 470 members of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana Bar had written to the Chief Justice of India as well as the other Judges of the Supreme Court, and the acting Chief Justice of the High Court of Bombay for a probe into the death of Judge Loya. A Criminal Writ Petition has also been filed before the Nagpur Bench of the High Court of Bombay seeking that an enquiry be conducted outside Maharashtra into the death of Judge Loya and advocate Shrikant Khandalkar.

Judge Loya was the CBI Judge hearing the ‘Sohrabuddin Fake Encounter Case’. A case in which the BJP President Amit Shah was one of the accused. The BJP President was discharged on the grounds of ‘lack of evidence’ by the second Judge to hear the case after the death of Judge Loya, allegedly by a ‘heart-attack’. The sequence of events surrounding the death of Judge Loya should be cause for grave concern. According to his family, they received calls informing them of his death from 5 am onwards, yet the post-mortem report states the time of death as 6:15 am. The condition of the body was also not that of a person who had died of a heart attack. The signature on the post-mortem report was of the ‘paternal cousin’ of the deceased. Yet his father denied that any such relative lived in Nagpur where the death and post-mortem were conducted. When his phone was returned to the family, all the data had been deleted. What makes the heart-attack story most disconcerting is that Judge Loya was a teetotaler with no family history of heart problems.