British paedophile duo arrested

Paedophile case: Two British nationals arrested

News Updates! Two British nationals, convicted on charges of sexual abuse of minor boys living in shelters run by them in Mumbai, were arrested on Monday, three days after the Supreme Court overturned their acquittal by the Bombay High Court.

Duncan Grant, 67, and Allan Waters, 63, were arrested from Mahatma Phule Nagar slum in Cuff Parade of South Mumbai, senior Inspector at Colaba police station Vinod Sawant said.

The duo, accused of sexually abusing minor boys living in shelters run by them, would be produced before a sessions court, he said.

Besides ordering the duo to serve their remaining jail terms, the Supreme Court had on Friday also directed recovery of damages and fines imposed on them by a sessions court on March 18, 2006.

The trial court had ordered the Britishers to pay a compensation of 20,000 UK pounds each while also imposing a fine of Rs 15,000 on William D’souza, the Indian manager at the shelters-for-homeless run by the convicts at three places in Mumbai.

Waters and Grant were sentenced to six years each. While Waters has undergone five years imprisonment, Grant has served three years and two months. D’Souza has served a month longer in jail than the term of three years imposed upon him.

The apex court had last Friday restored the conviction on appeals by civil society Childline India Foundation and Maharashtra government, challenging the order of Bombay High Court which had freed them in July 2008.

“Children are the greatest gift to humanity. The sexual abuse of children is one of the most heinous crimes. It is an appalling violation of their trust, an ugly breach of our commitment to protect the innocent,” the apex court had observed while restoring their said while restoring the conviction.

A case against the trio was registered in November 2001 on the intervention of the civil society on the basis of statements of the two victims at the Anchorage Shelter Home in Colaba run by the Britishers.

However, the duo had left the country when the case was registered against them. While Waters was arrested in USA in pursuance of an Interpol notice against him and brought to India, Grant surrendered before an Indian court on his own in 2002.

The High Court had set aside their conviction imposed by the sessions court in 2006, saying none of the other children living in the shelter Anchorage, run by the two, had corroborated the two victims’ depositions of their sexual abuse.

Hasan Ali Khan remanded

Hasan Ali remanded to Enforcement Directorate custody

The Supreme Court on Thursday remanded Pune stud farm owner Hasan Ali Khan in Enforcement Directorate’s custody for four days, while pulling up the trial court judge who had granted bail to him dismissing the agency’s plea for his remand in a money laundering case.

A bench of justices B.Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar said it was “deeply disturbed” at the manner in which the trial court judge had rejected the ED’s contention and granted bail while giving a lengthy order for it.

The apex court initially remanded Mr. Khan, 53, in ED’s custody for 72 hours but extended it to four days following a plea made by Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium.

“The way the proceedings were conducted, we are deeply disturbed,” the bench observed, while staying the trial court’s order for bail to Khan and wondered, “Why has the learned judge written so much?”

The apex court said it was staying the trial court’s order due to the extraordinary circumstances of the case.

“The order passed by the learned judge has created an extraordinary situation which may ultimately frustrate the entire investigation. Having regard to the extraordinary situation, complexity of the issue and the magnitude of the case, we deem it fit to stay the order,” the bench said.

Earlier, making a plea on behalf of the ED, the Solicitor General submitted to the court that the trial court judge had exceeded his brief and passed an unusual order for granting bail to Mr. Khan, despite neither the accused nor his counsel making any plea for it.

He pointed out the judge had granted bail to Mr. Khan, while dealing with ED’s plea for his remand for his custodial interrogation.

The Solicitor General claimed the ED was in possession of incriminating evidence against Mr. Khan showing that he has stashed huge black money in various banks abroad.

He alleged Mr. Khan had withdrawn about $60,000 from a Swiss bank and cited communications from Swiss official sources to substantiate the allegation.

A Mumbai court had on March 11 rejected ED’s plea for custodial interrogation of Mr. Khan on the ground that the agency had not gathered sufficient evidence to justify its plea for his custodial interrogation.

Mr. Khan is also facing a Rs 70,000 crore tax demand notice from the Income-Tax Department as well as the ED probe.

The ED had arrested Mr. Khan on March 7 after being pulled up by the Supreme Court for its failure to ensure his custodial interrogation. But the trial court had let him off.

Mazda Sued Over Seat Belt Death.

Court: Family can sue Mazda over seat belt death

The Supreme Court will let Mazda be sued in California courts in a case involving a woman who died while wearing a seat belt across her lap in her family's minivan.

The high court in a unanimous judgment Wednesday agreed to let the lawsuit go forward, despite complaints from the car company that federal regulators gave it an option on whether to install lap belts or lap-and-shoulder belts in the middle seats in the back of the van.

Thanh Williamson's family wants to sue Mazda Motor of America Inc. because it made its 1993 Mazda MPV minivan with only lap seat belts in the middle seat of the van's second row. Williamson, a married mom from Utah, died in a 2002 accident; her family says her body jackknifed around the lap belt causing fatal internal injuries.

Federal regulations require lap-and-shoulder belts for the front seats and the rear outer seats but give companies an option on the rear middle or aisle seats. The Williamsons want a court to say that Mazda was negligent for not putting the lap-and-shoulder belts on the inner seats on its own.

But Mazda, which is based in Hiroshima, Japan, said it is immune from lawsuits because the federal government in 1989 gave it a choice of installing either lap or lap-and-shoulder seat belts in the middle rear seat. A lawsuit forcing them to use lap-and-shoulder belts, the company said, would invalidate the choice being offered by the regulation.

California state courts have agreed, throwing out the family's lawsuit. They cited a 2000 Supreme Court decision that threw out lawsuits that tried to force car companies to install air bags in cars instead of other passive-restraint devices.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority judgment, said the only way that Mazda would be immune is if the "significant objective" of the federal regulation was to give auto manufacturers a choice of which seat belts to install.

The Transportation Department "gave no indication that its safety goals required the mixture of seatbelt types that resulted from manufacturers' ability to choose different options," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a concurring judgment.

Added Breyer: "The more important reason why DOT did not require lap-and-shoulder belts for rear inner seats was that it thought that this requirement would not be cost-effective. The agency explained that it would be significantly more expensive for manufacturers to install lap-and shoulder belts in rear middle and aisle seats than in seats next to the car doors. But that fact — the fact that DOT made a negative judgment about cost effectiveness — cannot by itself show that DOT sought to forbid common law tort suits in which a judge or jury might reach a different conclusion."

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the judgment, but said the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 made coming to that conclusion even easier.

"Congress has instructed that 'compliance with a motor vehicle safety standard prescribed under this chapter does not exempt a person from liability at common law," Thomas said. "This saving clause 'explicitly preserves state common-law actions.' ... According to Mazda, the Williamsons' lawsuit alleging that it should have installed a lap-and-shoulder belt instead is pre-empted. That argument is foreclosed by the saving clause; The Williamsons' state tort action is not pre-empted."

Car company stock prices dropped shortly after the ruling was announced, some by more than four times the percentage decline in the Dow Jones industrial average.

Shares of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. were down more than 4 percent. Toyota Motor Corp. shares fell nearly 2 percent. But prices began to recover by midafternoon. Ford finished down 2.4 percent at $14.86 for the day while GM ended the day off 3.3 percent at $34.59. Toyota Motor Corp. shares eased 0.57 percent to $90.17.

The Dow Jones industrial average, meanwhile, lost 107.01 points, or 0.9 percent, to 12,105.78.

"It kind of opens up the possibility for further lawsuits," Bill Selesky, an auto industry analyst with Argus Research in New York, said of the ruling. "It's just a general worry that the car companies might be liable for some type of financial payout to settle this stuff."

Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in this case because she worked on it while serving as solicitor general.