Mumbai: Divya Pahuja, who is accused of conspiring with the police in the alleged fake encounter of Haryana gangster Sandeep Gadoli who was also her boyfriend, on Tuesday withdrew her plea filed mid-January, in which she pleaded guilty to some of the charges. She reasoned that she had filed the plea under depression as her mental state worsened in the prison. Pahuja has been in jail for six-and-a-half years.
“My application for plea bargaining was filed under duress, mental instability and depressed state of mind,” her plea stated, adding that she is a patient of severe depression for which she is taking medicines and treatment in prison.
Pahuja underscored that she has filed the present plea out of free will, without coercion or influence and that she was in a healthy state of mind while doing so. In her earlier plea, she had said that Gadoli has 43 serious offences registered against him and was threatening her with abducting her family members if she does not meet him.
Maintaining that she was innocent and falsely implicated in the case, Pahuja asserted that she agreed to cooperate with the Haryana police to get him arrested so as to save her family. She specified that she was unaware of their intentions of the policemen, her co-accused.
She had then sought for plea bargaining and grant of bail while urging the court to consider her young age, the duration that she has been an undertrial and that her education has come to a standstill after her arrest eight years ago.
