The Supreme Court Thursday rejected former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s plea to suspend his 20-year jail sentence in the 1996 drug planting case.

A bench of Justices J K Maheshwari and Ajay Bishnoi said it was not inclined to entertain the matter.

The case against Bhatt under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act has its origins in the arrest of a Rajasthan-based lawyer, Sumer Singh Rajpurohit, by the Banaskantha district police in Gujarat in 1996 following the alleged recovery of drugs from his hotel room in Palanpur.

Rajpurohit, who was later discharged in the case, accused Bhatt, who was the district deputy superintendent of police at the time, and other police officers of framing him by planting the drugs so as to harass him in connection with a property dispute.

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