PANAJI
In a major setback to Goa Police, two murder cases have ended up in acquittals.
The Tanuja Naik murder case, registered in July 2017, saw her husband, Atish Naik, acquitted by the Additional Sessions Court that pulled up the police over "missing" evidence crucial for the trial.
The Ponda police failed to submit a saree and pillow for examination during the trial. Additional Sessions Judge Cholu Gauns observed that despite the CFSL Hyderabad handing over these items to the investigating team, these were untraceable.
Till the end of the trial, the pillow and saree were not forwarded to the Court and as such these important articles of evidence remained to be physically identified by witnesses. “This is gross negligence on the part of Ponda Police Station in not forwarding MOs to court and amounts to destroying material pieces of evidence. Non-identification of pillow and saree is fatal to the prosecution case,” the Court observed. As per the prosecution, the accused murdered the deceased by smothering her with the pillow and thus it remained an important piece of evidence.
In another case, a man charged with killing his brother over an ancestral property dispute has been acquitted by the North Goa Additional Sessions Court. The Court observed that the prosecution failed to prove Sunil Gaonkar’s involvement in the murder case, registered 11 years ago at Bicholim police station.
As per the case details, Sunil, then aged 35 years allegedly hacked his 52-year-old brother Shashikant to death with an iron rod and attempted to bury him inside the cowshed near their house at Nanora.
The charge sheet, which the prosecution relied upon, stated that Sunil confessed to the crime, stating that he had struck his brother around seven times with the iron rod. The police also recovered the weapon and recorded the alleged destruction of evidence from the crime scene. However, the Court observed that the prosecution failed to prove the murder by the accused.
