The Kerala High Court, on Monday, April 7, dismissed actor Dileep’s appeal seeking a CBI probe into the 2017 actor assault case. Dileep is the eighth accused in the case and is allegedly the mastermind who hatched the conspiracy of the crime. The court had earlier, in December 2018, dismissed his plea asking for a CBI probe and he moved an appeal in the matter in March 2019.
According to LiveLaw, the court, while hearing the appeal case, observed that the actor sought repeated adjournments in the appeal. A bench of Justices AM Mustaque and P Krishna Kumar dismissed the appeal, stating that the trial before the Principal District and Sessions Court in Ernakulam is nearing completion. However, the bench had quashed certain observations of the single judge who earlier dismissed his plea, saying that the matters are to be decided at the appropriate stage. The details of the observations are awaited.
Dileep had moved the Kerala High Court asking for a CBI investigation into this case, alleging that the Kerala police’s investigation was biased. He had also stressed the police’s failure to retrieve the original video of the actor’s assault as recorded on Pulsar Suni’s mobile phone and that the police’s failure to recover the original video and the phone on which it was recorded was an attempt by the police at suppressing the truth about the case.
The case pertains to the 2017 sexual assault of an actor who worked in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films. She was abducted and sexually assaulted in her car for two hours. The entire act was filmed by those persons to blackmail the actor.