CM, Manish Sisodia move court to restrain chargesheet leak

New Delhi: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy on Tuesday moved a court here urging it to restrain the city police from “leaking contents of the charge sheet” against them in connection with the alleged assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash to the media.

Additional chief metropolitan magistrate Samar Vishal took the application, moved by Kejriwal, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, and 11 other AAP MLAs, on record and sought a response from the Delhi police on it by August 25.

The Delhi police on Monday filed a charge sheet against Kejriwal, Sisodia and 11 legislators of the Aam Aadmi Party — Amanatullah Khan, Prakash Jarwal, Nitin Tyagi, Rituraj Govind, Sanjeev Jha, Ajay Dutt, Rajesh Rishi, Rajesh Gu-pta, Madan Lal, Parveen Kumar and Dinesh Moh-ania. In the application field by advocate Mohd. Irshad, the AAP politicians said that “the investigating agency is selectively leaking the excerpts of the charge sheet to the media malafidely, to assassinate the character of the persons allegedly mentioned in the charge sheet, especially Kejriwal and Sisodia.”

It said that the matter was sub-judice and the probe agency had no power to pass-on contents of the charge sheet to the media before cognisance is taken by the court.

“The act and conduct of the probe agency is an interference in the administration of justice as their only intention is to create hype in the media and to influence the proceedings so that the image of the chief minister and deputy chief minister are adversely affected,” the application said.

It claimed that if the agency is not restrained from making such “unca-lled for, unwarranted and biased comments against the two constitutional authorities (CM and Dy CM), same would cause irreparable loss to their image”.