Mumbai: 24 years on, 5 acquitted in Parel murder case

MUMBAI: Finding evidence shaky and witnesses untrustworthy in a night-time mob assault incident that occured during a power outage, the Bombay high court acquitted five residents of Parmanandwadi in Parel, South Mumbai in a 24-year-old murder case.
In 1998, the Sessions court convicted and sentenced the five men to life imprisonment. The trial court committed a “grave error’’ as the judgment was “full of surmises and conjectures’’ said HC bench of Justices Sadhana Jadhav and Prithviraj Chauhan.
Post conviction, in 2006, with HC nod, three defence witnesses were additionally examined, as in a separate trial two prior absconding co-accused were acquitted. Their evidence of the case being doubtful with no one to identify the assailants, the HC found more probable. All were on bail during appeal, one after spending 10 years in prison.
The case registered by R A Kidwai Marg police station was that the accused, a chief promoter of a housing society, and his followers had as a mob fatally assaulted with chopper, hockey sticks and fists a man who, though not a member, used to attend meetings and oppose proposals made by the office-bearers. There were 500 hutments and it was a Slum Rehabilitation Authority scheme.
The mob allegedly attacked the man at about 9.30 pm on July 14, 1997, with no streetlights on and hauled back the victim on the road when he tried to escape into a house. He was left bleeding, and when taken to the civic-run KEM hospital, declared dead on arrival. It was homicide, said the HC, citing a doctor who conducted the autopsy.
There was a dispute between the chief promoter and slum society members over whether they would be allotted 180 sq ft or 225 sq ft. The HC said, “It is difficult to digest how there can be a motive for the accused to assault the man who wasn’t a society member.”