Mumbai Special court acquits Chhota Rajan in 1993 Bombay blasts accused’s murder case
Rajan (62) and his associate Jaggnath Jaiswal, charged with murder and other offences under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), was acquitted by special CBI court judge AT Wankhede.
FollowA special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court on Thursday acquitted underworld don Chhota Rajan and his aide Jagannath Jaiswal in the Hanif Kadawala murder case. Rajan and Jaiswal were acquitted for cogent evidence.
Rajan (62) and his associate Jaggnath Jaiswal, charged with murder and other offences under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), was acquitted by special CBI court judge AT Wankhede.
Kadawala, who was accused of transporting weapons to Mumbai on the instructions of Tiger Memon, was killed on February 7, 2001, in his Bandra office by three men. Two other accused were acquitted earlier in a separate trial. This is among the over 70 cases that the CBI took over after Rajan was deported from Bali in 2015.
In 2004, four persons were acquitted in the same case. At that time, Rajan was a wanted accused. After his deportation from Bali, Indonesia in 2015, a supplementary chargesheet came to be filed in 2017 against him and Jaiswal, who was arrested in 2017 by the CBI. One co-accused Guru Satam is still wanted in the case.
As per the prosecution case, Kadawala was booked for helping actor Sanjay Dutt hide the AK-47 and the consignment of weapons that were used in the blasts, at the actor’s garage. The weapons were delivered to him by gangster Abu Salem, who was a part of the Dawood Ibrahim gang. Kadawala was arrested by the police under Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) in April 1993 for transporting weapons from the Gujarat coast to Mumbai under gangster Tiger Memon directions.
The CBI, which probed the murder case, had alleged that Rajan ordered the killing of Kadawala to gain publicity.
Prior to this, Rajan had ordered the killing of several other blasts accused, the central agency had said.
Rajan and his aide were acquitted by the court for want of evidence, their lawyers said.
The order also observed that one hand the CBI brought the story that those on bail in 1993 blasts case were killed by Chhota Rajan and that now, a contrary story that Kadawala’s elder brother had eliminated him through a contract killing. “It is difficult to gather from the evidence laid by the prosecution that under what circumstances the acquitted accused made the statement to the son of the deceased and his friend and what had prompted him to give such a statement that too after a lapse of 16 years,” the order had said.
