Twelve years after a Maoist ambush in Jharkhand’s Dumka district killed five policemen, the state High Court has delivered a split ruling. While one judge has upheld the lower court’s order of capital punishment, the second one set aside the order and acquitted the two people accused in the case.
While delivering the split ruling on July 17, a Division Bench of Justices Rongon Mukhopadhyay and Sanjay Prasad disagreed on whether there was enough evidence to sustain the conviction and the capital punishment that the Dumka sessions court had ordered in 2018.
The ruling pertains to a Maoist ambush that killed Pakur SP Amarjit Balihar and five others on July 2, 2013. The SP and his team were on their way back from a meeting when some Maoists ambushed their vehicles and fatally shot them. Apart from the officer, five other policemen – Rajiv Kumar Sharma, Manoj Hembrom, Ashok Kumar Srivastava, Chandan Kumar Thapa, and Santosh Kumar Mandal – were killed.
The attack left some others wounded. In 2018, the two accused — Pravir Murmu alias Pravir da and Santan Baskey alias Tala da — were sentenced to death. After hearing their criminal appeal, the Division Bench of the High Court delivered a 197-page judgement on July 17.
Setting aside their conviction, Justice Rongon Mukhopadhyay said eyewitnesses in the case – the policemen who survived the attack — could not credibly identify the accused. He also noted the lack of direct involvement of, or recovery of incriminating material from, the two convicts.
Justice Prasad, however, took a divergent view and held that the eyewitnesses had identified Pravir and Tala in court and that “the gruesome murder” of an IPS officer and his team “did not evoke any sympathy”.
Affirming the death sentence, Justice Prasad directed the state government to provide a compensation of Rs 2 crore to the family of the SP, and give a job in the rank of the deputy superintendent of police or the deputy collector to one of his children. He also ordered a compensation of Rs 50 lakh and Grade 4 government jobs to the families of the five other policemen.
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Special Public Prosecutor Vineet Kumar Vashistha said the split verdict means the case will now be referred to the Chief Justice for reassignment. He went on to say that Justice Prasad considered the case to fall under the “rarest of rare” category.
“The matter will now be placed before the Chief Justice of the Jharkhand High Court, who will reconstitute a bench to rehear the case,” he said.
