A man from Kashmir was sentenced to death on Wednesday by the NDPS special court after he was found guilty for the second time under the Narcotic Drug and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) charges.
A man from Kashmir was sentenced to death on Wednesday by the NDPS special court after he was found guilty for the second time under the Narcotic Drug and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) charges.
Ghulam Mallik, 49, was sentenced to death by the NDPS court in 2010.
An NGO filed a writ petition in the Bombay high court challenging the mandatory death sentence saying that it was unconstitutional and no independent hearing was given to the accused to put forth his reason against the punishment.
In June, the high court read down section 31A of the NDPS Act which made it compulsory for the special court to give death sentence to a
second-time offender and made it discretionary for the trial judge.
Accordingly, Mallik’s appeal was referred back to the special court for deciding on the quantum of sentence.
“He has been found guilty for the second time and accordingly the NDPS court has handed down the death sentence to him,” said special public prosecutor Arun Gupte.
On January 12, 2002, the Ahmedabad unit of Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) seized about 142kg of hashish concealed in 42 packets from a truck.
The RC book found in the truck had numbers of Mallik indicating that 55kg of hashish was to be delivered to him.
On January 14, 2002, officers from the Mumbai unit of NCB seized 1.8kg of hashish in Mallik’s Dongri house.
Mallik, in his interrogation, had said that he had stored hashish in the godown of one Gurudev Singh Vohra. The officers raided Vohra’s Dongri godown in the presence of Mallik and found 28kg of hashish. Mallik also led them to a godown next to Vohra’s which had 160kg of hashish.
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