The Kerala High Court on Tuesday, April 19, dismissed a plea by actor Dileep to quash an FIR of criminal conspiracy against him. Dileep in his plea had asked the court to either quash the case against him, or direct the investigation to be handed over to the CBI. A bench led by Justice Justice Ziyad Rahman AA delivered the verdict on Tuesday afternoon. The proceedings on Tuesday were brief, as the court assembled and announced almost immediately that Dileep's plea has been dismissed. A detailed order is awaited.
Dileep had moved court in February 2022, more than a month after the case was registered against him and five others for allegedly plotting a conspiracy to murder police officials who are investigating the actor assault case of 2017. Dileep is an accused and allegedly the mastermind in the actor assault case, the trial of which is still going on. In his plea to quash the FIR or transfer the investigation charge to the CBI, Dileep said that the conspiracy case against him was “vindictive, ill-motivated, pre-determined and malafide.”
The fresh case of conspiracy was filed against Dileep after a series of allegations were made against the actor by his former friend and director Balachandra Kumar. In November last year, Balachandrakumar came up with a number of audio clips, purportedly of Dileep and his relatives, plotting murder. During the hearing of his plea to quash the FIR, Dileep submitted to the court that the case was filed because he allegedly "wished" something and that there was "no human being who has not thought ill of another person, but that cannot be the cause for alarm or a basis for lodging an FIR."
Dileep had claimed that the new case was filed to create false evidence against him in the 2017 actor assault case.
Recently, Sai Shankar, a cyber expert also named in the conspiracy case, alleged that Dileep's counsel had sought his help to remove a large amount of data from the actor's phones — which could be crucial evidence in the actor assault case. In an interview with TNM, Sai said that he was 100 per cent confident of being able to retrieve the data.
The survivor actor, who came out to speak about her journey from being a victim to a survivor, was abducted and sexually assaulted in a moving car in Kochi in 2017. Months later, Dileep was arrested in the case. Less than three months later he came out on bail. The clippings that Balachandra Kumar produced are allegedly from this period of time in late 2017, in which Dileep is alleged to have pointed at a video showing the face of an investigating official, and saying that he would show what he will do to the officials who investigated the case.