Mercedes hit and run case: Juvenile kills 32-year-old man, family releases CCTV footage

Delhi Police challaned the man whose minor son allegedly ran over a 32-year-old marketing executive with his Mercedes car in the Civil Lines area even as the family members of the victim alleged police inaction in the case.

A senior police official said today that the “car owner was prosecuted under provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act”.

The man hired as driver by the owner of the Mercedes is also likely to be booked for misleading police during the interrogation, he said.

Even as police maintained that appropriate action has been taken in the case, relatives of Sidharth Sharma, who died in the mishap in north Delhi’s Civil Lines, claimed police inaction in the case.

Sharma’s sister Shilpa alleged that police “did not do anything” in the initial stage of the probe and kept talking about “protocols”.

“When an accident happens, you have seen the car, you have seen the driver, where does protocol come. After the incident, my friends were taking pictures of the witnesses, noting down their statements, which the police should have done. Now they are saying that they are waiting for the post-mortem report,” she said.

Claiming that police were lenient with the accused, the victim’s father, Prem Raj Sharma, said, “He (the juvenile) should have been apprehended right after the incident and put behind bars. Had the driver been apprehended on the spot, others, including the owner of the car, would have come to the police station automatically on their own,” he said.

Police yesterday apprehended the person driving the car.  The accused turned out to be the 17-year-old son of the car owner who was identified with the help of CCTV footage.

The minor boy, who will turn 18 in five days, was soon released on bail as per the law.

After the incident, the driver hired by the businessman had allegedly claimed that he was the one behind the wheels but later changed his statement when he got to know that Sharma was dead, a police source said.

Eyewitnesses had told police that they had seen a group of teenagers stepping out of the vehicle after the incident, all of whom fled the scene abandoning the car there.

The driver later turned out to be one of the occupants of the car, police said.