HC acquits encounter specialist

The sessions court, on Friday, acquitted dismissed police officer Pradeep Sharma but convicted another senior cop Pradip Suryvanshi in the sensational 2006 fake encounter case involving the killing of Ram Narayan Gupta alias Lakhan Bhaiyya who was suspected of having links with gangster and narco-trafficker Chhota Rajan.

Twenty-one accused including 13 policemen and eight civilians were convicted under various charges ranging from murder, wrongful confinement and destruction of evidence. Sessions judge V D Jadhwar while reading out the judgement said that the sentence would be read out on Monday.

The fake encounter of Lakhan Bhaiya created a sensation after the deceased’s brother Ramprasad Gupta moved the Bombay High Court alleging that the so-called death in an “encounter” was a case of “cold-blooded murder.”

The high court thereafter ordered a magisterial probe and then later formed a Special Investigations Team (SIT) to enquire into the allegations; Sharma, Suryavanshi along with 20 others were taken into custody.

Both probes concluded that the “encounter” was nothing short of a murder. In 2010, the SIT took Sharma into custody, the key accused in the case along with 21 others and charged them with murder. The accused were put in Thane Central Jail.

The prosecution case hinged on the key fact that the ballistics findings confirmed that the striations found in the bullets lodged in Lakhan Bhaiyya's body was fired from Sharma's fire arm and that the deceased was picked up from Vashi, a satellite town near Mumbai, along with one Anil Bheda and then secretly bumped off in Western Mumbai sea-side suburb Versova.

The prosecution also emphasised on various allegations and the alleged murky past of the so-called encounter specialists who despite being lionised by the media had come under fire for carrying out gangland killings for various criminal outfits. Sharma was one of the first of the ‘tainted’ cop to be dismissed from the service.

Taking the argument further the prosecution pointed out that the probe teams had unearthed that that Bheda was earlier detained in Versova, then shifted to Kolhapur Jail and then brought back to Mumbai and kept in a secret place for a month before being picked up again along with Lakhan Bhaiya.

In 2011, much to the shock of prosecution, Bheda the only eye-witness to the murder of Lakhan Bhaiyya disappeared from his house in Navi Mumbai just five days before he was to depose in the court in March that year.