Hashimpura Massacre Case: PAC truck and 17 rifles not used, says court

NEW DELHI: Questioning the absence of any blood or bullet marks in the UP Provincial Armed Constabulary truck with registration number URU1493, “which was not even seized”, the court concluded the said truck was never used in the Hashimpura massacre case of 1987, leading to collapse of the entire case.
“Fouler the crime, the clearer and plainer ought to be the proof”, the court said, acquitting all 16 accused last Saturday. The 216-page judgment, public now, says it was “painful” that innocents were killed by a state agency but said it won’t be swayed by emotions, “however strong they may be”, to take the place of proof. The court on Saturday said none of the survivors had identified the accused PAC personnel in court and the judgment now says other ‘proofs’ failed the test too.

The ‘evidence’ cited by the UP Police regarding PAC personnel using a truck with registration number URU1493 to bundle Muslims from Hashimpura village and then shoot them in cold blood, was summarily rejected by court. None of the witnesses, who claimed to be eye witnesses, have given the registration number of the truck which was involved, the court said. The police case was that the truck was washed after the incident, but court asked why it was inexplicably never seized.

“If so many persons were shot at inside the said truck during the indiscriminate firing, then presence of blood should be there for a long time even after washing of the truck. No blood has been found or lifted from truck number URU1493. As per prosecution, indiscriminate firing was opened by PAC officials inside the truck and in that situation, bullet marks would have been there but no such marks were found during examination by experts,” the court said. It cites Mahesh Narain Tiwari, an expert from FSL Lucknow saying he had inspected the truck at a Meerut police station but did not find anything in the truck “which would concern him.”

The court also dismissed that 17 seized rifles of the accused PAC men were the weapons of offence — saying the rifles were produced in unsealed condition during trial and not even a single empty cartridge had been recovered. “The punishment prescribed for the alleged offence is not less than life imprisonment or death penalty and in that eventuality the conviction cannot be based on weak evidence by ignoring the basic principals of appreciation of evidence simply because the case is of custodial deaths. The accused cannot be convicted on the basis of...unreliable, and faulty investigation...”