HC admits Chintan’s appeal against conviction for conspiring to kill Hema

Artist Chintan Upadhyay has filed an appeal against his conviction and life imprisonment for conspiring to kill his estranged wife, Hema Upadhyay.

The Bombay high court on Wednesday admitted an appeal filed by artist Chintan Upadhyay, challenging his conviction and the subsequent life imprisonment handed down to him by a lower court for conspiring to kill his estranged wife, Hema Upadhyay.

Chintan Upadhyay - Art exhibition Thus Spake Zarathurstra at Pundole Art Gallery at fort - Photo by Dipak Hazra 19.05.08

A division bench of justice Revati Mohite Dere and justice Gauri Godse found that arguable points were raised in the appeal.

Chintan has also filed an application seeking bail during pendency of his appeal. The bench has scheduled to take up the plea for hearing after two weeks.

The Dindoshi sessions court on October 10 sentenced Chintan and three others - Shiv Kumar Rajbhar, Pradip Kumar Rajbhar and Vijay Kumar Rajbhar - to life imprisonment. The three were held guilty for killing Hema, an artist, and her lawyer, Harish Bhambhani, who accompanied her on the fateful day.

According to the prosecution, Hema and Bhambhani were smothered to death on December 11, 2015, and the bodies were packed in cardboard boxes and dumped in a nullah in Kandivali West. The next day, a garbage collector discovered the bodies and alerted the police.

Police probe revealed that the double murders were executed by Chintan’s art fabricator Vidyadhar Rajbhar, who used his employees and contacts for the job. Vidyadhar is still at large.

On March 8, 2016, Pradeep gave a confessional statement before a metropolitan magistrate, unravelling how the conspiracy was hatched by Chintan and Vidyadhar and how it was executed by the latter, the three other convicts and a minor, who is being dealt with separately. Pradeep, however, retracted his confession when he appeared before the trial court.

Chintan denied the allegations and claimed that he had no reason to eliminate Hema as his plea for divorce was granted by the Bandra family court much before the incident and he had already paid a major chunk of the maintenance money to her.

In the appeal filed in HC through advocate Bharat Manghani on October 18, Chintan contended that the trial court had drawn inferences and the decision to convict him was not based on admissible evidence. The trial court should not have accepted Pradeep’s retracted and uncorroborated confession as a valid piece of evidence, he said. He claimed that the court discarded all other evidence adduced by the prosecution and based his conviction solely on the retracted confession.