“Police will book five men including a tourist guide for alleged gang-rape of an American woman at a five-star hotel in Delhi in March,” reported the Hindustan Times in December adding, “The woman has said the tourist guide befriended her while showing her tourist spots in Delhi and adjoining states. The woman said on the night of the incident, he entered her room with four of his friends, also related to the travel agency, on the pretext of discussing their next day’s journey route plan. They had drinks in the room after which the tourist guide forced himself on her, she said. The others also took turns to rape her before leaving the room, said a source familiar with the complaint. The traumatised woman went back to the US shortly after the alleged gang-rape, the complaint read.”

Karanjawala & Co partners Sandeep Kapur and Samarjit Pattnaik, senior Associates Puneet Relan and Vivek Suri and associate Niharika Karanjawala are defending the first of five accused Vivek Srivasatava, who is the bell boy of Park Hotel, in a sessions court in Delhi. He has now been granted bail.

Additional public prosecutor for the state Inder Kumar and advocate Mrityunjay Kumar for the complainant are acting from the prosecution. Advocate Varun Jamwal is acting for two of the other four accused.

Justice Anu Grover Baliga, who granted bail to Srivastava based on the fact that the victim could not identify him in the Test Identification Parade (TIP), stated in the order:

this Court is of the considered opinion that the accused Vivek Shrivastva is entitled to be released on bail keeping in view that this accused was about 38 years of age as on the date of the incident, is a well built, podgy person and is also almost completely bald and therefore his physical description does not at all match the description given by the complainant of the person who had escorted to her to the room and had given her drugged water on 08.04.2016. As narrated herein above, the said person, according to the prosecutrix, was in his late twenties, thin and had dark hair. Clearly, the accused Vivek Shrivastva, present in the Court, does not at all fit this description. It is this fact coupled with the fact that the prosecutrix failed to identify him during the TIP proceedings which has persuaded this Court to hereby hold that this accused at this stage, is entitled to be granted the benefit of bail.

Read order