Mumbai: Sessions court sentences four to life imprisonment for murder of Shiv Sena leader

MUMBAI: Dindoshi sessions court on Thursday convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment four men for the 2014 murder of Shiv Sena gat pramukh Ramesh Jadhav.
The court convicted Sohail Ansari and three others while acquitting one, a woman. One more accused, a juvenile-in-conflict-with-law, has his case pending for trial before the juvenile justice board.
The crime had led to rioting in the local area and a case against the alleged rioters is pending before the court.
The crime registered by Dindoshi police station was that the five accused had conspired to murder the politician and executed the plan by stabbing him in a scuffle in a chawl on October 21, 2014, in the evening in Malad east.
All five were arrested on October 22, 2014.
The complainant, Jadhav’s cousin, said Ansari, Yusuf Sazida, Imran Kazi and a minor were assaulting his neighbour and when he tried to intervene was assaulted too. He thus called Jadhav to the spot and when he tried to pacify, Ansari allegedly held him and two others Yusuf and Imran pushed him towards the wall, and Ansari stabbed him on his chest, face and hand, while the fourth adult accused Gullu Sazida stabbed him with a ‘gupti’ on the thigh threatening to kill him if he intervened. Jadhav succumbed to the injuries and all were booked and later tried for his murder.
Complainant’s lawyer Kaushik Mhatre, in written submissions to the sessions court, said it was a case based on direct eyewitness and in all 20 witnesses were examined to prove the prosecution case.
He said police collected metal pipes with blood stains from the spot and the accused Gullu voluntarily had disclosed where the “weapon (gupti) and blood-stained clothes were concealed." The police found it in a bush in a compound of a building construction site.
Avinash Rasal was later appointed special PP in the case and he along with local public prosecutors Ravindra Savle argued for the prosecution . They said that three eye-witnesses’ accounts of what happened and them identifying the accused along with the CCTV footage along with forensic report was sufficient to prove their guilt.
Defence lawyer Bhanudas Jagtap argued that Jadhav had fallen from the first floor of the building and the injury was not caused by a knife stab attack. He examined a defence witness who said he heard a sound of someone falling and saw a few men running as Jadhav had fallen from the first floor of his house and during the fall an iron rod got pierced into his thigh. The witness, a brother of the accused, deposed that he and two accused, including Gullu, took Jadhav to a nearby hospital for treatment. But in his cross-examination, he could not show any hospital entry or hospital CCTV footage and the prosecution said he was not a reliable witness but an “interested one" as he was trying to get an acquittal for his brothers. The story of a fall is not supported by medical evidence, said the prosecution.
The reasoned judgment will be available later.