New Delhi, Sept 1:
A Delhi court has acquitted 12 persons accused of murder, rioting and dacoity in a 2020 northeast Delhi riots case, ruling that mere membership of an unlawful assembly cannot establish criminal liability without proof of an individual’s specific acts.
Additional Sessions Judge Parveen Singh delivered the order in a case concerning the killing of Mursaleen, whose body was found in a drain near Johripur Tiraha on February 28, 2020.
The accused were Lokesh Solanki, Pankaj Sharma, Ankit Chaudhary, Prince, Jatin Sharma, Himanshu Thakur, Vivek Panchal, Rishabh Chaudhary, Sumit Chaudhary, Tinku Arora, Sandeep and Sahil.
In its August 25 order, the court stressed that the prosecution had to establish the individual acts of each accused in relation to the offences alleged against them.
The court held that criminal liability could not be imposed merely because a person was allegedly part of an unlawful assembly.
A key prosecution witness, Divesh Rajpoot, who was projected as an eyewitness to Mursaleen’s murder and had allegedly identified several accused persons, turned hostile during the trial.
The court noted that even after extensive cross-examination, his evidence did not establish a link between the accused and either the alleged unlawful assembly or the murder.
Another witness, Nisar Ahmed, also did not attribute any specific overt act to the accused.
The court rejected the prosecution’s argument that the accused could be presumed to have remained members of the same mob during subsequent incidents of vandalism, looting and arson.
It also questioned the reliability of a police witness who was unable to identify individuals in the mob and observed that merely hearing the names of accused persons being shouted could not constitute positive identification.
However, the court convicted Himanshu Thakur under Section 411 of the IPC after finding that Mursaleen’s mobile phone had been recovered from his possession and that he had been using a SIM card in the handset.
The ruling reiterates the principle that prosecution in cases involving unlawful assemblies must establish the specific criminal acts or legally relevant participation of individual accused persons rather than relying solely on their alleged presence in a mob.