12 years later, HC frees trio sentenced to life for kidnapping Khar boy

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the morning of February 10, 2010, when the boy, Ashutosh, was about to leave his home for Saint Teresa’s High School in Bandra west.

Mumbai: The Bombay high court recently reversed the convictions of three people, who were sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping an 11-year-old boy from Khar in February 2010.

A file photo of Bombay high court. (HT photo)

The division bench of justices Sadhana Jadhav and Milind Jadhav set the trio -- Nalasopara resident Pravin Chabinath Singh and Bandra residents Sandeep Omprakash Singh and Ajay Keshav Singh -- free after observing that the prosecution case was full of loopholes and discrepancies.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the morning of February 10, 2010, when the boy, Ashutosh, was about to leave his home for Saint Teresa’s High School in Bandra west. After coming out of his building, Hill View Cooperative Housing Society on 16th Road in Khar, the Class VI student hailed an auto to go to his school.

The prosecution claimed that instead of taking the child to school, auto driver Pravin took him towards the Mount Mary area in Bandra. On the way, Sandeep boarded the auto and the boy was taken to a room where the third accused, Ajay, was waiting for them. They purportedly gave some pills to the boy because of which he suffered from dizziness.

After he did not return home at his usual time – 2 pm, the parents began looking for him. In the evening, they lodged a missing person report after failing to find the boy, who remained in the confinement of the kidnappers for five days. Eventually, Unit 9 of the crime branch rescued the boy from a transit camp on February 15, 2010, and initially arrested Sandeep and Ajay.

Sandeep and Ajay were tried together for the offence of kidnapping, and kidnapping for ransom and both of them were convicted by the Mumbai sessions court on March 31, 2012, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Pravin was arrested later and convicted on November 30, 2016.

All of them had challenged their convictions in appeals before the high court, which set them free recently. The high court noted that though police claimed that the boy was kept in confinement for five days, both, the mother and step-father of the child said he returned back home after three day’s confinement.

HC also noted that though the boy was said to have been kept at a crowded transit camp with common washrooms on every floor, no witness who had seen the child or the kidnappers at the place was examined by the prosecution.

Besides, HC said the police failed to locate the auto-rickshaw used to kidnap the child, and bring its owner before the trial court to establish the connection between the vehicle with the purported driver, Pravin Singh, and the incident of kidnapping.

The bench was also irked to note that the entire case against the trio was based on telephone records, but the prosecution has failed to examine the telecom company officer concerned to verify the telephone records and prove the nexus between the telephone calls made from a particular sim card to the parents of the child.