MUMBAI: Fourteen long years he spent behind bars for homicide, virtually a life term, before being acquitted on Wednesday. Santosh Pandey, a youth in his twenties when he was arrested for the murder of well-known cardiologist Jehangir Vazifdar, 82, in his Colaba apartment in 1998, was ordered to be released by the Bombay high court after acquittal for lack of evidence. "There were no eyewitnesses in the case which was based on circumstantial evidence," said Pandey's advocate Arfan Sait.
After Dr Jehangir Vazifdar was stabbed to death and found in a pool of blood in his apartment in Avabai Mansion in Colaba on October 26, 1998, suspicion fell on Santosh Pandey and Omprakash Choudhari, who were working as watchmen and had gone missing.
Arfan Sait, the advocate appointed by the high court legal aid cell to represent Pandey, said: "There was no witness who had seen Pandey in the doctor's house. There was no recovery of weapon used in the murder or stolen property from Pandey."
He pointed out to a division bench of Justices Vijaya Kapse Tahilramani and A R Joshi that the only evidence going against Pandey was the recovery of his blood-stained clothes from near the building's tank on November 13, over a fortnight after the murder. But the recovery of the clothes from a public place, accessible to everyone, raised several doubts, including the fear that it could have been planted . "It was surprising that the police who were investigating the case had not found the clothes before," added Sait.
During investigation, Pandey's co-accused Choudhari was arrested from Rajasthan. The police recovered a Rolex watch worth Rs 2 lakh, a gold chain, foreign currency worth Rs 2.75 lakh and other articles from him. Pandey was subsequently arrested from the Cooperage ground on November 9 the same year.
A trial court in July 2004 held the duo guilty of murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment. Pandey filed his appeal challenging the trial court verdict in 2005. It came up for hearing in the high court only last month.
Meanwhile, in 2010, the high court ordered that Choudhari be released as a report by the sessions judge found that he was 16 at the time of the murder and was, therefore, a juvenile. According to the Juvenile Justice Act, the maximum punishment a minor can face is three years in a correction home.
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