A Delhi court on Thursday dismissed the bail petition of Ashutosh Bharadwaj, one of the accused men in the case of the gruesome death of a 20-year-old woman in the city’s Kanjhawala area on January 1, PTI reported.

In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Anjali Singh had died after her scooter was hit by a car. Her body got entangled in the wheels of the car and was dragged along for nearly 12 kilometres. Her naked body was later found in Kanjhawala’s Jonti village.

Six accused – Manoj Mittal, Deepak Khanna, Amit Khanna, Krishan, Mithun, Ashutosh and Ankush – were sent to judicial custody for 14 days on Monday. Ankush, was granted bail on January 7.

On Thursday, Metropolitan Magistrate Sanya Dalal said that Bharadwaj cannot be granted bail considering the gravity of his alleged offences and the fact that investigation in the case is at its initial stage, reported PTI.

Additional Public Prosecutor Atul Srivastava argued that Bharadwaj had misled the police by claiming that his co-accused Deepak Khanna was driving the car, while it was found during the investigation that it was another accused Amit who was at the wheel.

“When he [Deepak Bharadwaj] was a free man, he misled the investigation,” Srivastava told the court, according to PTI. “He can mislead again in future.”

Advocate Shilpesh Chaudhary, representing Deepak Bharadwaj, told the court that his client was not present in the car at the time of the incident and that all alleged offences against him were bailable in nature.

On this, Srivastava argued that Deepak Bharadwaj was still under the legal compulsion to inform the police.

“It is never our case that Bharadwaj was inside the car but that he provided the vehicle involved in the accident to another co-accused who did not possess a driving licence,” Srivastava said.

The case

The first information report in the case stated that the car dragged Singh’s body for 12 kilometers from Sultanpuri to Kanjhawala. The 20-year-old woman was returning home at 2 am when the accident took place.

Two of the accused persons, Deepak and Amit Khanna, had borrowed the car from Ashutosh, who in turn had borrowed it from his brother-in-law Lokesh, according to the police.

Ashutosh had told the police that Deepak Khanna and Amit Khanna took the car on December 31 around 7 pm and left the vehicle at his home around 5 am on January 1 after the accident, according to the FIR. The three other arrested men were also present in the car at the time of the accident.

A postmortem report had shown that Singh sustained injuries to her head, spine and lower limbs. It also showed that she had not suffered any injuries suggestive of sexual assault.