RCB Employee Granted Interim Bail After Bengaluru Stampede Shocker

The Karnataka High Court on Thursday granted interim bail to Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s marketing head, Nikhil Sosale, along with three others from DNA Entertainment Network, following their arrests linked to the tragic stampede outside Bengaluru’s Chinnaswamy Stadium on June 4.

The court, led by Justice S.R. Krishnakumar, ruled in favor of temporary relief for the four accused and directed all of them to surrender their passports. The decision came after the court wrapped up hearings on Wednesday into the legality of their arrests and was widely anticipated given the high-profile nature of the case. 

Sosale, along with DNA Entertainment employees Kiran Kumar (Senior Event Manager) and Sunil Mathew (Vice President - Business Affairs), was arrested by the Central Crime Branch in the early hours of June 6. The arrests came just two days after the deadly stampede that occurred during RCB’s IPL victory celebrations, which tragically left 11 people dead and many others injured. 

Sosale was reportedly picked up at the airport on Friday morning, and his legal team promptly challenged the arrest in the High Court, calling into question the basis of the action. After multiple sessions of arguments that stretched into midweek, Justice Krishnakumar delivered the much-awaited interim ruling on Thursday. 

During Wednesday’s proceedings, Advocate General Shashi Kiran Shetty, representing the state, strongly opposed bail. He argued that RCB and its event partners were squarely responsible for the chaos outside the stadium. Shetty said RCB had a standing agreement with the BCCI, under which the franchise was responsible for handling ticketing, gate control, and event security. According to him, RCB’s actions—particularly their open-ended social media posts—contributed to the disaster. 

“The franchise invited the whole world,” Shetty said, referring to RCB’s widely circulated posts that failed to provide clear instructions on how to attend the event. The State argued that post led to lakhs of fans arriving at the gates of a stadium that could only accommodate 35,000 people. The court’s decision on interim bail came amid a parallel request from the Crime Investigation Department (CID), which had approached a local magistrate for nine days’ custody of the accused in order to further investigate the events leading to the stampede. 

For now, while the interim bail offers temporary respite for Sosale and the others, the case is far from over. The coming days will likely bring further scrutiny on how the event was handled—and who bears ultimate responsibility for a night that should have been celebratory but turned into tragedy.