A court has acquitted a 27-year-old man in a murder case, observing that the prosecution failed to prove the motive behind the killing.
Additional Sessions Judge S B Bahalkar, in his order earlier this month, gave the benefit of doubt to the accused, Alok Singh.
He said the prosecution failed to prove the charges under Indian Penal Code Sections 302 (murder) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) against the accused.
The prosecution told the court that the accused and the victim, Dharmendra Singh (29), were roommates and worked as operators at a weighbridge in Thane's Bhiwandi town.
On August 1, 2009, the victim's family members in Uttar Pradesh could not reach him on his mobile phone and enquired with the accused about him.
The accused apparently informed them that Dharmendra Singh had left the room the previous night saying he would return after two days.
However, when the family could still not contact him, they filed a missing person's complaint with police on August 2.
The police later found the victim's shoes, wallet and mobile phone lying abandoned behind the weigh-bridge and the body in a water fit located nearby.
The investigators subsequently seized some clothes of the accused and an iron rod from his room, and alleged that he had killed his roommate.
The prosecution told the court that the postmortem report stated the cause of death as 'cardio respiratory failure due to hemorrhagic shock because of injury to brain and fracture of skull bone with a sharp object'.
The judge observed that a proper panchnama was not carried out of the items seized from the accused.
"I have some more reasons to disbelieve the prosecution's evidence. According to the First Information Report (FIR) and medical evidence, it appears that there were incised wounds on the head and forehead of the deceased, probably caused by a sharp object," he noted.
However, the probing officer seized the iron rod as the weapon of the crime, he said.
"An iron rod is definitely not a sharp weapon. It is a hard and blunt object. Thus, even the recovery of weapon is not consistent with the prosecution's case," the judge said.
Moreover, it is important for the prosecution to prove what was the motive of the accused behind commission of the crime, he said.
"The prosecution's evidence nowhere discloses the motive. Based on these reasons, I can safely conclude that the prosecution has not brought sufficient and cogent evidence to prove the guilt of the accused," the judge said.
