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Home  » News » Naqvi refutes Tytler's claims of BJP shielding 84 'culprits'

Naqvi refutes Tytler's claims of BJP shielding 84 'culprits'

By Onkar Singh
Last updated on: April 28, 2010 09:30 IST
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Senior vice-president of the Bhartiya Janata Party Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi has rejected Congress leader Jagdish Tytler's claims that the Vajpayee government had dropped the cases against Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and BJP leaders for their alleged role in the anti-Sikh riots that broke out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi.

"When someone gets cornered he/she will make these sort of allegations. Since the BJP was carrying out a campaign against Tytler for his prosecution for his role in the anti-Sikh riots, it is natural for him to shout from the roof top hoping that someone will believe him," Naqvi told rediff.com.

In a conversation with rediff.com a couple of hours after the court delivered the judgment on Tuesday, Tytler released a letter he had written to senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad earlier.

In the letter, he accused the BJP of shielding the "culprits" and dropping charges against them under what he called "the benign rule of the Home Minister L K Advani".

"Is this not caring? Is it not shielding," he wrote in his letter dated January 2, 2010.

Additional Metropolitan Magistrate Rakesh Pandit of a Delhi court accepted the closure report submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation in connection with Tytler's case on Tuesday.

The CBI had stated that the witnesses in the case, Balbir Singh, who now lives in California, US, and Surinder Singh, who died sometime ago, had made unreliable and contradictory statements against Tytler and hence it would not be proper to order further report.

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Onkar Singh in New Delhi