BILASPUR: Chhattisgarh high court on Monday rejected bail application of Soni Sori, a 36 year old tribal teacher, against whom the Bastar police had slapped a number of cases linking her with Maoist activities. The bench of Justice Prashant Mishra rejected the bail plea of Soni Sori and another accused Lingaram Kodopi after hearing their counsels. Rejecting the bail plea, the court observed that the allegations against them were of serious nature.
Earlier during the course of arguments on the bail plea, her counsel Shishir Dixit pointed out that the trial court in Dantewada had already acquitted Soni Sori from five out of eight cases registered against her by the police. Another accused Lingaram Kodopi was represented by his counsel Ranjit Singh Marhas. Sori was arrested on October 4, 2011 in New Delhi, when she was on the run on the allegations of being a Maoist sympathizer and acting as a conduit to extort Rs 1.5 million for the banned CPI (Maoist) from the Essar group.
She was handed over to the Chhattisgarh police despite her insistence that she was being framed by them. Later, civil society and human rights groups alleged that she was tortured in police custody. The Essar case and another case on Maoist attack on Congress leader Avdesh Singh Gautam are the two crucial cases still under trial. In the Essar case of payment of protection money to the banned CPI (Maoists), Essar General Manager D V C S Verma and contractor B K Lala are out on bail while Sori and her activist nephew Linga Kodopi are still in judicial custody.
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