Ex-IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt gets 20-year jail term in 1996 drug planting case | Ahmedabad News

The court on Wednesday had held Bhatt guilty under Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act sections 21(c), 27A (punishment for financing illicit traffic and harbouring offenders), 29 (abetment and criminal conspiracy to commit offence under NDPS Act), 58 (1) and (2) (vexatious entry, search, seizure and arrest). He has also been held guilty under Indian Penal Code sections 465 (forgery), 471 (using forged document), 167 (public servant framing an incorrect document with intent to cause injury), 204 (secrets or destroys any document), 343 (wrongful confinement), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intent).

Bhatt’s sentence will run concurrently.

This is the second conviction of the former IPS officer in a criminal case. In 2019, Bhatt was sentenced to life imprisonment in a case of alleged custodial death in Jamnagar, dating back to 1990. The Gujarat High Court in January upheld the conviction in the case, rejecting Bhatt’s appeal against the trial court’s decision.

The drug planting case was in cold storage for nearly 20 years — from 1996 to 2018 — until the Gujarat High Court in April 2018 ordered that an FIR, which accused Bhatt and others of falsely implicating the lawyer, be investigated by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) comprising officials of Gujarat CID (Criminal Investigation Department). Twenty-two years after the incident, Bhatt was arrested in September 2018 in the case.

In 1996, Bhatt was serving as the superintendent of police of Banaskantha when the district police arrested lawyer Sumer Singh Rajpurohit, a resident of Pali in Rajasthan, for allegedly keeping 1.15 kg of opium at a Palanpur hotel in 1996.