The City, Civil and Sessions Court on Monday absolved the five youngsters, charged with murdering their teenage friend Adnan Patrawala in 200, of their crime.
The court found that the evidence presented by the prosecution was ‘vaguely circumstantial’ and ‘not substantial’ enough.
It was a murder that had shaken the city. And it was a murder that bore sinister resemblances to Hitchcock’s famous teenage murder film “Rope.”
On August 19, 2007, 16-year-old Adnan, was allegedly kidnapped by his friends-Sujit Nair, Ayush Bhat, Rajeev Dharaiya and Amit Kausha, now in their twenties. The fifth accused being a teenager, the police and the Juvenile Court carried out in-camera proceedings against him.
After Adnan’s father reported him missing, a search was launched in and around Mumbai. In one of the adjacent satellite towns of Navi Mumbai, Adnan’s body was found in his father’s car. Post-mortem of the body revealed that the 16-year-old boy was strangulated.
According to prosecution the five accused had kidnapped Adnan to extract a ransom of Rs 2 crore from his family. However, the plan went awry after television news channel started beaming that Adnan, a son of a wealthy businessman had been kidnapped for a ransom.
The prosecution stated that the kidnappers after they realised that the news about ransom had broken out, strangulated him and left the body in Patrawala’s vehicle in one of the shrub-saturated side-lanes of Navi Mumbai.
Tracing the antecedents of Adnan friendship with the five accused, investigators found dozens of exchanges between them on a social networking site. Moreover, during interrogation of the accused, one of them took them to the site where Adnan’s clothes were buried.
The prosecution during the proceedings told the court that the accused had befriended Adnan in a gaming parlour and since some of the members of the ‘so-called juvenile gang’ had debts to be cleared, a plan was hatched to carry out kidnapping for extracting a ransom.