Zeenews Bureau
Mumbai: A Mumbai local court on Monday acquitted four people accused in the Adnan Patrawala murder case after the prosecution failed to produce concrete evidence against them.
Out of the five accused Sujit Nair, Amit Kaushal, Ayush Bhat, Rajeev Dhariya were let off by the court, while the fifth accused, being a minor, is being tried in a juvenile court.
The prosecution has, however, decided to challenge the trial court's verdict in the Bombay High Court.
Adnan's father and Mumbai builder Aslam Patrawala has described the court verdict as "shocking".
"Very shocking, very shocking. What can I say? Justice has been denied to us. How can they do this? We will go to the higher court," Aslam Patrawala told reporters outside the court.
Categorically denying any laxity on his part, he said, “We are not sure as to what went wrong since we have been following the case since a long time. We have done everything in our capacity.What else could we do?”
However, Patrawala told reporters that his family would approach Supreme Court to get justice.
Patrawala also defended Mumbai Police by saying, “It did everything which it could do to bring the culprits to justice.”
Sujit Nair's lawyer Ashish Chavan said that the court rejected the conspiracy theory put forward by the prosecution.
"The court rejected prosecution witness' claim that he heard the accused hatching the plan to kidnap Adnan in a shopping mall,"he said.
"All the four accused have been acquitted by the court. The prosecution has failed to produce evidence in the court. The prosecution failed to establish the theory of conspiracy. The entire case is based on circumstantial evidence and the chain of events has not been established. It is still a death, (but) murder has not been proved," said Chavan.
Adnan, 16, was killed in Mumbai on August 19, 2007 allegedly by his friends.
The accused had allegedly befriended Adnan. They later kidnapped him and demanded a ransom of Rs 2 crore from his family. Police found Adnan's body on the Palm Beach Road in Navi Mumbai. He had been strangled to death.
All accused were charged with kidnapping, murder, extortion and destruction of evidence.
First Published: Monday, January 30, 2012, 14:53