By IANS
New Delhi : The Delhi High Court Wednesday acquitted former central coal minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) chief Shibu Soren of the charge of murder of his private secretary Shashinath Jha.
A division bench of Justice R.S. Sodhi and H.R. Malhotra stayed the judgements of the trial court of Nov 28 and Dec 5, 2006 saying the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had failed to prove the charges against Soren and the other accused.
“The prosecution failed miserably. Trial court analyses on the evidence are not convincing,” said the high court.
The CBI could not also prove that the skeleton dug out in a village in Jharkhand was Jha’s, the court said.
Soren, 62, is presently lodged in a prison in Jharkhand, where he also faces trial for his role in a 1975 mass murder in the state. He is likely to be freed if the CBI does not appeal in the Supreme Court against the Delhi High Court ruling.
In Jha’s murder case, senior counsel D.K. Mathur, appearing for Soren, 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”.
Jha was allegedly murdered for demanding a portion of the money the JMM leaders reportedly received from the Congress as bribe for supporting the P.V. Narasimha Rao government during a no-trust motion in parliament in July 1993.
Mathur said the DNA samples of the body said to be Jha’s did not match that of his mother and brother though the CBI thrice sent the samples to a forensic sciences laboratory.
The CBI had retrieved the skeleton from a pit in a house in Piska Nagri near Ranchi.
The trial court judge had wrongly relied on a skull superimposition test, Mathur said, adding that the evidence thus derived could not be taken as clinching.
Soren’s counsel also argued that the CBI was unable to prove that Jha was abducted from Dhaula Kuan in south Delhi and taken to Bihar at Soren’s behest. A trail court had acquitted the alleged abductors.
He told the court that 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.
Additional Sessions Judge B.R. Kedia had convicted Soren in November last year on charges of conspiring to abduct Jha and for his murder.
Soren was forced to quit as coal minister from the Manmohan Singh government after his conviction.