Gill
moves bail application, HC to hear the plea today
NEW
DELHI, Dec 19: A day after his conviction in the
Jessica Lall murder case, Amardeep Singh Gill
today moved an application in the High Court
seeking bail.
Gill’s plea
for bail is likely to be heard tomorrow by the
Division Bench of Justice R S Sodhi and Justice P
K Bhasin.
The Bench
yesterday convicted Gill and Vikas Yadav for
desrtucting evidence besides holding prime
accussed Manu Sharma guilty of murdering the
model in 1999.
The court said
both Yadav and Gill had removed the black Tata
Safari car, which Manu had abandoned in the
parking area after shooting Jessica at Qutub
Colonnade restaurant on the intervening night of
April 29-30,1999.
Gill and Yadav
were held guilty by the Bench under sections 201
(destruction of evidence) and 120-B (criminal
conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
In the bail
application, Gill stated that all the offences
under these sections are bailable and he is
entitled to be granted bail. He also stated that
he has two school going children and old age
parent at home.
"I am the
only bread earner in the family" he said in
the bail application and sought the court to
consider his conduct and past record since the
beging of this case.
The court also
fixed Wednesday, to hear the arguments from both
prosecution and defence on the quantum of
sentence.
Jessica Lall was
shot dead after she had refused to serve drink to
Manu Sharma in a party. (PTI)
Polonium
between your fingers!
NEW
DELHI, Dec 19: You don’t have to be a Russian
spy to be poisoned by polonium. It is right there
in the cigarette you puff.
Ex-Russian spy
Alexander Litvinenko’s death due to polonium
made big news, but few realise that the same
polonium is also present in cigarette smoke, and
is one of the main causes of lung cancer in
smokers.
"Cigarette
smoke contains radioactivity. Smokers slowly
poison themselves and also the passive smokers
with polonium 210 and lead 210, two radioactive
materials. They do not suffer from any acute
radiation disease as the Russian spy but may
develop an increased risk of lung cancer,"
says Dr K S Parthasarathy, former secretary,
Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB).
Different
specialists arrive at different values for the
dose, but Dr Sajeela Maini, President, Tobacco
Control Association of India says "the risk
cannot be ignored."
The association
has infact filed a PIL against the Government and
is asking for a total ban on the manufacture and
sale of cigarettes. Many NGOs and health bodies
had earlier approached the Government urging that
it direct the cigarette manufacturers to label
the amount of nicotine and tar present in it.
But she says, most
people don’t know that cigarette smoke also
contains carbon monoxide, TSN and radioactive
substance like polonium and lead. "One puff
of cigarette contains 4800 chemicals (I call them
poison) out of which 69 are carcinogens. And the
smoke which a passive smoke inhales contains no
less than 400 of these chemicals."
Burning makes
these chemicals more dangerous and carcinogenic
and thus the smoke is more harmful, she says.
Lighted cigarettes
produce polonium and insoluble lead in the
mainstream. Smokers inhale them deep into their
lungs. The airways branch into narrower and
narrower passageways. The particles of smoke
bearing radioactive residues get deposited at
these branches. These hotspots deliver high
radiation doses. Most lung cancers are formed in
these regions, Dr Parthasarathy, also a nuclear
radiation expert, says.
In 1982, hundreds
of smokers stopped the habit after reading an
article "Radioactivity in Cigarette
Smoke" in the New England Journal of
Medicine. T H Winters and J R DiFranza of the
University of Massachussets Medical Centre wrote
that cigarette contains radioactivity in the form
of Polonium-210 and lead-210, notes Dr
Parthasarathy.
The report claimed
that a person smoking one-and-a half pack of
cigarettes per day receives a dose to certain
regions of the lung equal to 300 X-Ray films of
chest per year.
According to T C
Rao, a former researcher at the US Department of
Agriculture, radioactivity in tobacco came from
phosphatic fertilisers, which contained uranium
and its decay product radium 226. This radium
decays into a number of products including
polonium 210 and lead 210. Tobacco roots may
absorb some radioactivity from soil.
However, Dr
Parthasarathy notes that Indian farmers do not
use phosphatic fertilisers. Scientists at the
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre have shown that
polonium 210 levels in Indian tobacco are 10-15
times lowers than those in American tobacco.
He quotes Dr
Ravenholt, a former director of World Health
Surveys at the US Centers for Disease Control,
that Americans receive more radiation from
tobacco smoke than from any other source.
American smokers smoke on an average 11,000
cigarettes annually.
"Many Indians
are not far behind," he says. (PTI)
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