Jawan convicted of fragging acquitted

A State Reserve Police Force jawan, who had been convicted by a lower court for murdering his colleague, was recently acquitted by the Bombay high court.

The Nagpur Bench of the court acquitted Ishwar Masram as it found that, although the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial evidence, the chain of circumstances was not proven beyond reasonable doubt.

The murder took place in naxal-affected Gadchiroli district in Vidarbha.

According to the police, Masram had killed his roommate Gangadhar Thakare on the night of January 6, 2006.

The police said that Masram had confessed to killing Thakare who taunted him for being ‘impotent’.

The high court, however, said that in a case based on circumstantial evidence, the prosecution has to prove every circumstance beyond reasonable doubt and further prove that the circumstances are so interwoven that they lead to no other conclusion but the guilt of the accused.

“We find that the prosecution has failed to do so,” the judge said while setting aside Masram’s conviction.

On the night of the incident, inmates of the camp, who had heard gunshots, initially mistook the firing to be a attack by naxals. It later later turned out that one of their colleagues had been killed.

In August 2009, a trial court in Gadchiroli sentenced Masram to life for the murder. This was challenged in high court.

The high court, after going through evidence, concluded that Masram’s extra-judicial confession (to his colleagues) was unreliable. It also refused to accept evidence pertaining to bloodstains on the two jawans’ clothes. Besides, it said that a ballistic expert’s opinion about which bullet was allocated to which jawan was not conclusive and the expert was not examined as witness.