Sixteen months after 40-year-old British national Stephen Bennett was found murdered in Malsai village off the Mumbai-Goa highway, his family has alleged that he was used as a pawn.
Sister says he was used as pawn by friends who owed huge money to a dealer
MUMBAI: Sixteen months after 40-year-old British national Stephen Bennett was found murdered in Malsai village off the Mumbai-Goa highway, his family has alleged that he was used as a pawn by his acquaintances and maintained that he was killed by the drug mafia.
According to his sister Amanda, Stephen’s two friends, fellow Brits John Cronin and Gabriel Hannon, owed a huge sum of money to a drug dealer named Shauna Boy. Cronin and Hannon, she said, were put up in Goa for over two months.
“My brother checked out of the hotel room after he witnessed a brawl between Cronin and Hannon,” said Amanda, in reply to an e-mail sent by DNA. “The two then went underground and the drug mafia presumed my brother was the culprit,” she wrote. According to her, Cronin and Hannon owed Rs35lakh to the drug dealer.
Stephen’s body was found hanging from a tree on a hillock on December 10, 2006. The police had initially registered a case of suicide. However, after the post-mortem report which indicated assault and bruises on his neck and chest, a case of murder was registered.
A small-time filmmaker, Stephen came to India on December 4 and headed straight to Goa for a vacation. According to the police, he was on a train from Madgaon to Mumbai. He alighted at Roha, an enroute station, but never reached Mumbai.
Unhappy with the police investigations into the case, Amanda made several trips to Goa and Malsai in search of the truth.
Calling the investigations into the case fudged, Amanda rubbished police claims that villagers murdered her brother as he misbehaved with a woman when she had gone to attend nature’s call during the night. “He was killed by the drug mafia,” she insisted.
Also, while police officials from Alibaug said that Stephen was a drug addict and had consumed large amounts of drug, Amanda said that the forensic report in the UK confirmed that there were no narcotic substances in his body.
The Roha police had arrested six villagers — Nathuram Mohite, Kashinath Marathe, Raja Malsure, Ravindra Dalvi, Ramesh Mene and Vithoba Mene — on charges of murder. However, they were subsequently released on bail by the Bombay High Court due to lack of evidence. The police have filed a charge-sheet in the court accusing the six people of murdering Bennett.
“If the court grants us permission to look into the fresh allegations, we will re-investigate the case,” superintendent of police (Raigad) Pratap Dighawkar said. He said the police had not come across any drug mafia angle so far in the case.
s_poornima@dnaindia.net
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