Last year, the Supreme Court settled the land dispute on the Babri Masjid site (representational)
Lucknow:
BJP chief Vinay Katiyar, former parliamentarian Ram Vilas Vedanti and four other defendants appeared before a special CBI court in Lucknow on Thursday in connection with the Babri Masjid case.
The court, however, recorded Vijay Bahadur Singh’s only statement due to lack of time and asked the others to appear on Friday.
Besides Vijay Bahadur Singh, Pawan Pandey, Santosh Dubey and Gandhi Yadav had appeared in court today.
Special Judge SK Yadav also ordered them to provide defense evidence in writing, if any, after recording their statement.
Thirty-two people, including former UP chief minister Kalyan Singh, former deputy prime minister LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Vinay Katiyar, Sadhvi Rithambara and Sakshi Maharaj, will be tried in this case .
LK Advani, Messrs Joshi and Uma Bharti have been exempt from personal appearance until further notice.
The prosecution completed the examination of its witnesses on March 6 and the court asked some of the accused to appear before it on March 24 to record their statements.
However, the procedure did not take place because the Lucknow court closed due to the coronavirus crisis.
When the proceedings resumed on May 18, defense counsel made a request to summon three prosecution witnesses to cross-examine them, which was allowed.
On April 19, 2017, the Supreme Court ordered the special judge to conduct a day-to-day trial and conclude it in two years.
The supreme court had qualified the verdict of February 12, 2001 of the High court of Allahabad to drop the charges of conspiracy against LK Advani and others like “erroneous”.
On May 8 of this year, the Supreme Court set a new deadline for the special judge, asking him to render his verdict by August 31.
Last year, another bench from the Supreme Court settled the land dispute over the site of the mosque.
It allowed the construction of a Ram temple on the site and ordered the allocation of separate land to Ayodhya for a mosque.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
