HC declines to hear Pacheco bail plea

As lawyers from both sides were preparing to push ahead with their arguments, Justice N A Britto told an expectant courtroom quietly: “No, not before me.”
Pacheco’s lawyers said they would move the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court to constitute a new bench to hear their application.

To approach court

“They want to detain my client illegally. He has every right to approach the courts,” the MLA’s legal counsel Surendra Desai told Deccan Herald.  He said he wasn’t directly in touch with Pacheco – who has been on the run for a fortnight – but was acting on instructions passed on to him.

The former minister, who is the prime accused in Nadia’s death, pins the blame squarely on the media reports for his recent torrent of troubles.  “The accusations made by the press are false and politically motivated in order to see that the petitioner’s political career is terminated,” he said in his bail application.

Pacheco said he had been made a suspect in the case only because he was a “close friend” of Nadia’s and because the Goa Police was out to “fix” him.  “The investigation is not being carried out in a fair and impartial manner and the investigation agency is trying to fix the petitioner as accused with a one-track mind,” he said.

Pacheco does not deny being with Nadia through her hospitalisation or helping her family with the hospital bills. The crime branch says Pacheco had spent Rs 40 lakh on her treatment before her death. But he also attempts to clear himself of his role in the turmoil of her personal life.

The police were overlooking the possibility that Nadia had “voluntarily decided to end her life finding no way out from the mess she had put herself into,” says Pacheco, who is blamed for the break-up of Nadia’s marriage.