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In a major development in the Pune Porsche crash case, the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) on Tuesday rejected the plea to try the accused 17-year-old boy as an adult.
In the early hours of May 19, 2024, a Porsche allegedly driven by the minor mowed down two IT professionals, Anish Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta, in the Kalyani Nagar area.
The Pune Police had sought that the minor be tried as an adult, saying he committed a "heinous" act, as not only were two persons crushed to death, but there were also attempts to tamper with the evidence. However, the JJB rejected the police's plea to treat the accused boy as an adult.
The lenient bail terms, including asking the minor to write a 300-word essay on road safety, had triggered a nationwide storm, following which he was sent to an observation home after the accident. However, on June 25, 2024, the Bombay High Court directed that the boy be released immediately, saying the JJB's orders remanding him to an observation home were illegal and the law regarding juveniles must be implemented fully.
Recently, his mother, Shivani Agarwal, was granted bail in connection with the alleged swapping of the minor's blood samples to conceal his intoxication at the time of the crash.
Currently, a total of nine accused are still behind bars, including the minor's father, Vishal Agarwal; two doctors from Sassoon General Hospital, Ajay Tawre and Shreehari Halnor; Sassoon Hospital staffer Atul Ghatkamble; two middlemen, Ashpak Makandar and Amar Gaikwad, accused of facilitating financial transactions in the blood swapping case; and three others – Aditya Avinash Sood, Ashish Mittal and Arun Kumar Singh. Sood and Singh are the fathers of the other two minors who were with the juvenile driver in the car when the accident took place and whose blood samples were also swapped. Mittal is Singh’s friend, whose blood sample was swapped with that of Singh’s minor son.
