New Delhi: In a verdict shockingly similar to that in the Jessica Lall case, a city court has acquitted five persons accused of abducting and killing cartoonist Irfan Hussain nearly seven years ago for want of evidence.
The sole witness turned hostile, and Additional Sessions Judge Talwant Singh held the prosecution responsible for not being able to establish the complicity of accused.
Singh claims that he had to rule the way he did because of numerous contradictions in the prosecution's argument.
The court absolved Mustafa Ansari, Sanjay, Heera Singh, Mohammed Jasim and Mohammed Shahid of the charges of kidnapping and killing the cartoonoist.
"In a case of circumstantial evidence, everything must be proved independently and the chain of events should be able to completely prove that the accused are indeed guilty. This was missing in this case," said the court.
The kidnapping, murder and recovery of Irfan's car could not be effectively linked to the accused and thus the court had to let them go.
Irfan's younger brother Rizwan came to know of the verdict only on Friday while he was surfing the Internet.
Irfan Hussain, who worked with the weekly news magazine Outlook, was returning home at 10.45 PM on March 10, 1999, when five robbers allegedly stopped his car near the Ghazipur red light in East Delhi.
According to the police one of the five accused stabbed Hussain a number of times killing him on the spot.
kidnapped and later killed by a gang of car thieves on a highway in east-Delhi on March 8, 1999.
His body was disposed off in the nearby woods and the car taken away.
The car was recovered in Anantnag, Kashmir after 9 months.
His decomposed body was found in a secluded area in East Delhi five days later.
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