Pune Porsche crash: Underage driver’s friend’s father denied bail for exchanging son’s blood sample

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected bail plea to Arunkumar Devnath Singh, who is accused of tampering with evidence in the Pune Porsche accident case.

Singh allegedly altered his minor son’s blood sample at the government hospital to protect him from legal action as he was found in an inebriated state after a Porsche driven by another minor killed two software engineers in Pune on May 19.

A bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Ahsanuddin Amanullah rejected Singh’s plea and upheld the Bombay High Court’s earlier order denying him bail before his arrest.

Singh is accused of instructing hospital staff to change his son’s blood sample because the original sample showed that the boy was drunk at the time of the accident.

However, Singh denied the charges, claiming that he was not named in the initial FIR and was not present at the hospital at the time of the alleged incident.

In its defence, Singh’s legal team, including Senior Advocates Sidharth Luthra and Vibha Dutta Makhija, argued that the prosecution had not alleged that Singh personally tampered with evidence.

They also argued that the acts attributed to him, even if true, would amount to a bailable offense only under Section 201 of the Indian Penal Code (now Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita) as it resulted in disappearance of evidence.

Despite these allegations, the Supreme Court agreed with the Bombay High Court’s assessment that there were insufficient grounds for granting bail at this stage.

The father of the Pune teenager who was driving the vehicle at the time of the accident allegedly bribed doctors to replace his son’s blood samples with his mother’s.

He was arrested for wrongfully trapping his family’s driver in their bungalow and trying to force him to confess that he, and not the minor, was behind the wheel at the time of the accident. He was later released on bail in the case.