JOIN USAfter 34 years, a retired lieutenant colonel has finally walked out clean on charges of killing a Delhi-based businessman using a parcel bomb.
The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeals filed by the CBI and the victim’s father against former officer S J Chaudhary’s acquittal by the Delhi High Court.
On October 2, 1982, Chaudhary reportedly sent Kishan Sikand (40) a parcel bomb, which led to his death.
It was charged that Chaudhary had threatened Sikand after having failed to win back his wife Rani, who divorced him to marry the businessman. After a prolonged trial, the sessions court had in 2008 held Chaudhary guilty of murder and awarded him life imprisonment.
A year later, the high court, however, overturned the trial court’s judgement and acquitted him, saying that the CBI had failed to prove the chain of events that pointed at the guilt of the accused.
As the matter reached the apex court, Chaudhary’s counsel contended that the whole case was based on a presumption that the officer nursed a grudge against Sikand due to his relationship with Rani.
“All the three protagonists, namely Chaudhary, Rani and Kishan, had experience of previous marriages... So, divorce and living apart was not a new concept to any of the three parties so as to motivate them to kill someone,” it was said.
There was also no sudden trigger for Chaudhary to plan in such detail as charged and kill Sikand as Rani had already left Bengaluru, where the accused was posted in 1976.
Chaudhary was already reconciled to life without her and was only concerned with the upbringing of their daughters. It argued that there was neither an eyewitness nor any evidence to show that Chaudhary delivered anything, let alone a booby trap parcel, at Sikand’s residence.
The counsel for the accused also termed as “preposterous” the suggestion that he had stolen a Pakistan-made hand-grenade during the India-Pakistan war in 1971 for its use years later in 1982.
The CBI’s charge that a typewriter used for printing address on the parcel was recovered from Chaudhary’s residence could also not be proved, with the Supreme Court holding that the high court was right in acquitting the accused.