Air India urination case: Victim accepted compensation, complaint was a 'malicious after-thought', says counsel for accused

New Delhi [India], January 6 : Counsel for the accused Shankar Mishra, who allegedly urinated on an elderly woman onboard an Air India flight, on Friday said that the victim had accepted the compensation and the complaint was a malicious after-thought.
Shankar Mishra allegedly urinated on an elderly lady onboard an Air India flight between New York and Delhi on November 26 last year.
Advocate Ishanee Sharma said, "If you go through WhatsApp messages between the accused and the woman, it clearly shows that the accused has gotten clothes-bags cleaned; the woman has condoned the action but accepted her stuff back."
Advocate Sharma further said that the victim returned the money and said that they don't want to keep any contact with them.
"She accepted compensation and not used words like "I don't need it" or "This won't do" in any message. Suddenly there was an after-thought, I want to call it a malicious after-thought, where they returned the money and said, "This isn't done and don't keep any contact with us," she said.
She further said that there are a lot of loopholes in the case.
"This complaint thing was an after-thought. There's no eyewitness account. Nobody came out to say that they have seen the incident happening. How is that possible? The plane had more people besides the two people in question. There are a lot of loopholes," said Sharma.
Mishra's counsel further urged the media to wait for the other version of the story to come out.
"All I want to say, is the media should responsibly and patiently wait for the other version of the story to come out, Let the man be innocent until he is proven guilty. All his fiasco towards ruining his image should stop," she added.
The Delhi Police on Wednesday filed an FIR on the shocking incident based on a complaint by Air India.
The police have registered an FIR in the matter under sections 354, 509, and 510 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 23 of the Indian Aircraft Act. Both the accused and the victim are from outside Delhi.
Air India also imposed a 30-day flying ban on the passenger.
Meanwhile, Delhi police on Friday issued summons to six-eight crew members, including the pilot of the Air India flight in the urination incident.
According to the complaint filed on Wednesday by the victim, the crew brought the accused to her seat and forced her to face him as he begged to be spared arrest.
The woman was "stunned" when the offender was brought before her and he "started crying and profusely apologising".
The complainant has alleged that the pilot vetoed giving her a seat in the first class after the incident.
"The flight crew told me that the pilot had vetoed giving me a seat in first class," she wrote in the complaint.
On November 26, S Mishra, allegedly drunk, unzipped and urinated on the woman. He remained at the spot, exposing himself until another passenger asked him to return to his seat.
A Look Out Circular (LoC) has been issued against the accused who has been evading arrest.
According to the Delhi Police official when the team reached his residence in the Kamgar Nagar area in Mumbai, he was not there.
Going by the technical surveillance, the last location of the suspect was in Bangalore which is his workplace's official address.
"A Delhi police team went to Bangalore and found he has taken leave from office," the sources said.
The victim, in her complaint filed on Wednesday, has said that she wanted the man arrested but the "crew brought the offender" before her against her wishes and he profusely apologised so that no complaint is filed against him.
In her complaint to 'Grievance Air Sewa', the woman narrated the entire incident in detail and said the man "unzipped his pants and urinated on me and kept standing there until the person sitting next to me tapped him and told him to go back to his seat".
She alleged that the Air India crew was "deeply unprofessional" and was "not proactive in managing a very sensitive and traumatic situation".