A Kerala court has said that a charge of destruction of evidence was made out against actor Dileep in connection with the 2017 actor assault case in which he is one of the accused. The Principal Sessions Court in Ernakulam said on Friday, October 28, that the charges under section 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and 204 (destruction of electronic record or document to prevent its production as evidence) under the Indian Penal Code were made out against the actor and his businessman-friend Sarath.
The court dismissed their pleas seeking discharge from these additional charges, the actor's lawyer said. It listed the matter on October 31 for reading out the charges to the two accused, the lawyer said. These charges were invoked against them by the police in an additional charge sheet filed in July this year, after carrying out a further probe into the 2017 case based on certain revelations made by director Balachandra Kumar.
In May, the police had recovered certain photographs from the phone of Anoop, Dileep’s brother, which were deleted from it. The photos contained detailed second-by-second commentary of the visuals of the assault on the woman actor in 2017.
The sexual assault survivor, an actor who has worked in Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu films, was abducted and assaulted in her car for two hours by a gang of men, who had forced their way into the vehicle on the night of February 17, 2017 and later escaped in a busy area. Pulsar Suni, who led the attack, is the main accused in the case, while Dileep, who is alleged to have masterminded the crime, is the eighth accused.
The entire act was filmed by the accused, the visuals of which are in a memory card in the custody of the trial court in Ernakulam. Earlier this year, there were questions of a leak of the content in the memory card when its hash value was found to have been changed. The hash value, a unique set of characters used to identify a device, changes when there is a change in the device or any of its individual contents.
(With PTI inputs)