By IANS
New Delhi : The Delhi High Court will Wednesday pronounce judgement on an appeal filed by former coal minister Shibu Soren challenging his conviction by a trial court in Jharkhand for the murder of his private secretary Sashinath Jha 13 years ago.
A bench of judges R.S. Sodhi and H.R. Malhotra had reserved their verdict in the case on Aug 1 after completion of the arguments of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), led by counsel Siddharth Luthra.
Soren is currently lodged in a Jharkhand jail undergoing trial for his role in a 1975 mass murder in the state. He had allegedly led a mob that attacked Muslim-dominated Chirudih village in Jamtara district in a campaign to drive away “outsiders”, a term used to describe non-tribals. Ten people including nine Muslims were killed in the attack.
Senior Counsel D.K. Mathur appearing for the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) chief had submitted in the high court that he had been wrongly convicted in the 1994 murder of his secretary and the charges slapped on him by CBI were “false”.
Mathur said the DNA samples of the body said to be of Jha’s did not match that of his mother and brother despite the CBI having thrice sent the samples to a forensic sciences laboratory.
The CBI had retrieved the skeleton of Jha from a pit in a house in Piska Nagri near Ranchi.
Even though the DNA tests were considered to be clinching evidence, the trial court judge had instead wrongly relied on a skull superimposition test, Mathur said, adding that the evidence derived from that test could not be taken as clinching.
Soren’s counsel said the CBI was also unable to prove that Jha was abducted from Dhaula Kuan in Delhi and taken to Bihar at Soren’s behest. The agency had failed to prove that Jha was abducted from Delhi and a trail court had acquitted the alleged abductors.
He told the court his client had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the trial court on the basis of false charges slapped by the CBI.
CBI counsel Luthra argued that the agency had gathered evidence and presented it during the trial to prove that Soren was involved in the conspiracy to kill Jha.
Additional Sessions Judge B.R. Kedia had convicted Soren in November last year for conspiring to abduct Jha and for his murder. Jha was allegedly murdered for demanding a cut from the money the JMM leaders had reportedly received from the Congress party in bribes for supporting the P.V. Narasimha Rao government during a no-trust motion in parliament in July 1993.
Soren has challenged his conviction on the grounds that the court failed to appreciate the fact that the DNA tests on the skeleton recovered by the CBI failed to establish that it was Jha’s. The 62-year-old was forced to quit as coal minister in the Manmohan Singh government after his conviction.