New Delhi: Delhi High Court Wednesday sought Delhi Police’s response to an appeal filed by former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain challenging his conviction and life sentence in the murder of Intelligence Bureau staff member Ankit Sharma during Feb 2020 riots.A bench of Justices Prathiba M Singh and Vikas Mahajan admitted the appeal and listed it for hearing on Dec 2, along with connected appeals filed by the co-convicts. The court also directed the jail authorities to place Hussain’s nominal roll on record and called for the trial court records.Hussain has challenged the trial court judgment convicting and sentencing him in the case, alleging that the investigation was aimed at implicating him to satisfy public anger.The counsel for Delhi Police said the state would argue all the appeals together.“All connected appeals arising out of the same judgment are coming up on Dec 2. We have to assess the role of everybody. We will assess everybody’s role separately but will hear them together. It will save judicial time if heard together,” the court observed.According to the prosecution, Sharma, who was posted with Intelligence Bureau, went missing on Feb 25, 2020. His father, Ravinder Kumar, informed Dayalpur police the following day. He later learnt from locals that a body had allegedly been dumped in Khajuri Khas drain after a murder near Chand Bagh pulia.The prosecution said Sharma’s body was recovered from the drain with 51 injuries.On July 31, additional sessions judge Parveen Singh sentenced Hussain and four co-convicts, Nazim, Qasim, Javed and Anas, to life imprisonment for Sharma’s murder, holding that the case did not fall within the “rarest of rare” category warranting the death penalty.In his appeal, Hussain alleged that “the investigation against the appellant has been tainted since the very beginning, aimed at implicating him in order to satisfy public anger”. He further claimed that the FIR was ante-dated and ante-timed, that no material investigation was carried out until March 6, 2020, and that genuine eyewitness accounts were manipulated while the actual perpetrators were not brought to book.The trial court had declined to award the death penalty, observing that the prosecution failed to establish that the convicts possessed such violent tendencies or criminal propensity that their continued existence, even in prison, would pose a threat to society.