BJP leader, 2 others booked for farmer’s death
New Delhi, The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to Salman Khan, seeking the actor’s response within six weeks to Maharashtra government’s appeal against his acquittal in the 2002 hit-and-run accident case involving the death of a person and injuries to four.
“It would be better for your client to have the acquittal upheld by the Supreme Court,” a Bench comprising Justices J.S. Khehar and C. Nagappan told senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who pleaded for the dismissal of the appeal as there was no credible evidence against Salman.
The trial court had sentenced Salman to imprisonment for five years, but the HC set aside the conviction, prompting the state government to come in appeal to the SC.
Challenging the acquittal, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said the HC’s reasoning for its judgment was much more than being “perverse and improper”, the pre-requisite for setting it aside. This had resulted in complete travesty of justice and acquittal of the accused.
The HC had ignored crucial pieces of evidence and statements by key witnesses that had established the actor’s guilt — he was at the wheel, not his driver, in a drunken state and ran away from the accident site without bothering about taking the victims to hospital.
The driver theory was introduced in the case more than 13 years after the September 20, 2002, accident and precisely for this reason the trial court had rejected the claim of driver Ashok Brahmdev Singh, the AG pleaded. But the HC accepted the driver story despite the fact that he and Salman had remained silent on this aspect for so many years.
If the driver theory was true, the first thing Salman would have done was to make him surrender to the police, Rohatgi said.
The alcohol content in Salman’s blood was double that of the permissible limit despite the fact that the sample was collected 12 hours after the accident, he said.
Sibal, however, disputed the AG’s contentions and said the state government should have established that Salman was at the wheel by lifting his fingerprints and getting these analysed at the forensic lab. His blood samples were collected in two vials of 3 ml each, but just one vial containing 4 ml was sent to the lab after two days to assess the liquor content.
