Following the Chief Judicial Magistrate court Kotdwar issuing summons against 16 people accused of trespassing into the reserve forest area with arms and ammunition in violation of the Section 26 Forest Act, Pauri police have filed charge- sheets against them. Notably, one of the accused is a leading industrialist Sameer Thapar.
The court asked the accused to appear before the court on May 15. The accused had been arrested when they had been found partying in the Kolhuchaud forest rest house compound on New Year's eve with firearms and live cartridges on December 31, 2016. Further, the police had also found packets containing different types of raw and some cooked meat which had then been sealed and sent for laboratory analysis at Wild life Institute of India. On January 1, 2017, a case (FIR:3/2017) under sections 26(b)(g)(i),52(a) Forest Act 1927 (Uttarakhand amended in 2001) had been lodged against the 16 accused in Kotdwar police station.
Pauri Senior Superintendent of police Mukhtar Mohsin said that they have formed a team to serve summons to all the accused. Most of them are living in Delhi or Gurugaon, he said. “During raids, police found some persons sitting around fires while others were inside the forest rest house and tents set up in its premises. When asked to show the valid documents in support of their entry into a reserved forest area and staying at the forest rest house by the police, the group showed some papers which showed that just three rooms had been booked in the name of one Mohinder Singh,” he said.
After the matter had come into light the State Government had suspended district forest officer, lansdowne Mayank Shekhar Jha.
The accused- identified as Sameer Thapa, Rohit Singh Dagar, Jayant Nand, Rajkamal, Sunil Kumar, Rahul Rao, Narendra Anand, Manoj Sahgal, Sidharth, Randeep Man, Aarif Hussain, Mohendra Singh, Rajeev Jain, Rajiv Khanna, Romi Bhatt and Swarndeep- had been produced before the judicial court where they had been remanded to 14-day judicial custody. later, the accused had moved High Court and secured bail.