Birgunj Metropolitan City Mayor Rajesh Man Singh and others have been acquitted of charges related to preparing false documents.
A bench of Special Court Judges Basudev Acharya, Hemanta Rawal, and Dilli Ratna Shrestha acquitted Singh and the others on Monday.
The bench also acquitted then-administrative officer of Parsa Shad Kumar Pokharel, Birgunj-3 ward secretary Bhikhari Ray, ward member Tufail Akhtar Thakurai, Pushkar Rana, Parshuram Pokharel, and Rita Bhattarai.
Mayor Singh and Bhattarai were accused of preparing forged documents to acquire citizenship for someone else's daughter by claiming her as their own.
In their statements to the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) and the Special Court, Singh and Bhattarai said that they had married in 2000 and had a daughter.
They said that they registered the daughter’s birth on November 6, 2014, because a birth registration certificate was required when she was studying in Grade 8, and that she obtained Nepali citizenship from the District Administration Office in Birgunj on July 29, 2018.
They maintained that the citizenship had been obtained through the proper legal process and that they had committed no offense.
The court held that the fact that the daughter’s birth-registration and citizenship details could not be found in the records of the ward and district administration offices concerned was not, by itself, sufficient to conclude that Singh had destroyed the records, as he was not responsible for maintaining those records.
The court further stated that the citizenship certificate could not be invalidated merely on technical grounds, such as the absence of a marriage registration for Rajesh Man Singh and Rita Bhattarai or an incorrect citizenship number being recorded in the birth-registration document, since the daughter had been issued Nepali citizenship by the authorized District Administration Office, Parsa, through a lawful process.
