The Shah Alam Sessions Court has sentenced a police constable to a total of three years' jail for causing hurt to detainee A Kugan in the long-running ‘death in custody’ case.
Judge Aslam Zainuddin, in delivering the verdict, noted that V Navindran’s defence was a bare denial and found him guilty of two counts of causing hurt.
Although Navindran, 29, received three years for each of the two charges, Aslam ordered the sentences to run concurrently.
He allowed a stay of execution to the sentence but increased Navindran's bail to RM20,000.Navindran claimed trial on Oct 1, 2009 to two charges of causing hurt under Section 330 of the Penal Code.
Kugan, 23, died while in police custody after allegedly being severely beaten up in the interrogation room of the Taipan police station in USJ-Subang Jaya at 7am on Jan 16, 2009.
Navindran was acquitted on Jan 28 last year but, following an appeal, was told to enter his defence.
He had originally been charged with a count of causing grievous hurt to Kugan, but the High Court dismissed the appeal on that charge and only allowed the two counts of causing hurt to stand.
Earlier this year, Kugan's mother Indra Nallathamby (right), 43, had filed a RM100 million law suit
against then Selangor police chief Khalid Abu Bakar (now deputy
inspector-general of police), Navindran and then Subang Jaya police
chief Zainal Rashid Abu Bakar (now deceased), as well as the police
chief and the government. Kugan, a suspected car thief, died at the Taipan police station. His family found signs of injury on his body after they barged into the Serdang Hospital mortuary to claim his remains.
The family-members were not satisfied with the post-mortem at the Serdang Hospital, which found ‘sudden death caused by fluid accumulation in his lung’.
A second post-mortem at the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre led to the case being re-classified from sudden death to murder.
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