Tejas Navale
Pune, May 9, 2025: A special court on Thursday rejected the bail applications of two accused who were arrested for misleading the police by swapping blood samples of the minor accused in the Kalyani Nagar car accident case. The order was passed by Special Judge K. P. Kshirsagar.
While rejecting the bail plea of these accused, the court observed that taking into account the nature and seriousness of the crime and further seeing the evidence and the witnesses against the accused, it is not feasible for the court to sanction bail to the accused.
The names of the accused who were denied bail are Ashish Satish Mittal and Arunkumar Devnath Singh. On the midnight of May 19, 2024, a speeding car, driven by the minor accused under the influence of alcohol, hit the two-wheeler in the Kalyaninagar area, resulting in the death of two IT engineers. After the incident, the police found that all the people inside the car were intoxicated while driving the car.
Subsequently, the police took them to the Sassoon Hospital to test their blood samples. Meanwhile, the parents of the minor accused, Vishal and Shivani Agarwal, and another accused, Arunkumar Singh, collaborated with Ashpak Makandar, Amar Gaikwad, Aditya Sood and Ashish Mittal to swap blood samples of the accused children to save them. They then bribed the then Chief Medical Officer of the Emergency Department of the hospital, Dr. Srihari Halnor, and the then Head of the Forensic Department, Dr. Ajay Taware, through a constable at Sassoon Hospital, Atul Ghatkamble.
During this whole incident, an employee of Arunkumar Singh gave some money to the accused, Ashish Mittal, to give his own blood samples in place of one of the accused children. However, this whole incident was later exposed in the police investigation and the police arrested Ashish Mittal on August 19, 2024. At that time, Arunkumar had absconded from the police arrest. But, when the court rejected his pre-arrest bail application, he surrendered himself to the police on November 8, 2024.
