Indian billionaire Pankaj Oswal’s daughter Vasundhara, who was illegally detained for 5 days and illegally arrested for 2 weeks in Uganda, has spoken up about her time within the African nation.
Vasundhara Oswal spoke about her time being illegally detained and jailed in Uganda. (PTI)
Chatting with PTI, Vasundhara mentioned her human rights had been violated by police officers. She was falsely charged with the kidnapping and homicide of Mukesh Menaria, an worker of her father Pankaj. Menaria was later discovered alive in Tanzania.
“My human rights were grossly violated. For example, when they proceeded to raid the site, they did not have a search warrant,” Vasundhara mentioned. “When I asked them to present a search warrant, they said, ‘We’re in Uganda. We can do anything. You’re not in Europe anymore,’ and they basically proceeded to raid,” she added.
She went on to recall that police in Uganda pressured her to accompany them to the Interpol workplace on the pretext of assembly their Director. “I did not want to do [this] that same day,” Vasundhara mentioned.
A male police officer later picked her up and threw her inside his van, saying, “No, you have to come today only. It’s not going to happen tomorrow anytime otherwise”.
She was later forced to give a statement to Interpol while being accompanied by a civil lawyer instead of a criminal lawyer. “They didn’t give time for us to even arrange a lawyer as they said that if I didn’t give a statement then I would be held indefinitely,” she mentioned.
Vasundhara mentioned she was detained in a cell after giving the assertion and was requested to present $30,000 and her passport for a police bond. “I obliged but I didn’t get a police bond. They threw me back inside the same cell,” she recalled.
She even introduced an unconditional launch order from the court docket the subsequent day however wasn’t launched and was illegally detained for an additional 72 hours.
“All this while, I didn’t know what I was being detained for,” she mentioned. The police then took Vasundhara to a lower-level Justice of the Peace court docket and charged her with ‘kidnap with attempt to murder’, which she claims shouldn’t be allowed as this will solely be achieved in a excessive court docket in Uganda.
Vasundhara was then thrown into a jail for 2 days with criminals convicted for petty crimes like theft. She was later moved to a different jail, the place the nation homes convicted criminals like murderers and human traffickers. “I spent the next two of my ordeal in [that] prison,” she mentioned.
“Even after [police] found that [Menaria] was alive, they still proceeded to keep me in prison on those charges. They found him on October 10, about a week to two weeks before I got bail,” Vasundhara mentioned.
She additionally claimed that her enterprise rivals paid-off about 20 legal professionals that had been employed by her to current her case. She lastly received bail on October 21.