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NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday admitted an appeal by the Bihar government challenging a Patna high court judgment acquitting 13 people, ten of whom were awarded death sentence by the trial court for brutally killing 34 upper-caste men in Senari village by a Maoist organisation on March 18, 1999.
A bench of Justices S Abdul Nazir and Krishna Murari admitted the state’s appeal after hearing arguments from advocate Abhinav Mukerji, who said that the HC in its May 21 judgment ignored vital eye-witness accounts of the killings that took place over 22 years ago. SC permitted the state to serve notices on the 13 acquitted accused.
It was said that the Maoist organisation perpetrated the massacre allegedly to take revenge for the Ranvir Sena, a private army of upper-caste people, allegedly killing 56 Dalits at Laxmanpur Bathe in 1996 and 23 more at Shankarbigha in 1999. The Bihar government told the SC that these caste-violence incidents are from its “dark period of history”.
The prosecution case, believed by the trial court, was that “the accused belonged to the lower-caste extremist outfit MCC and had carried out the attack against unarmed and defenceless members of the upper-caste people with a view to establish their supremacy and is a fallout of the unfortunate caste based conflicts that ravaged the state ”.
Mukerji said the HC erred in acquitting the accused even though the case of the prosecution was supported by as many as 23 witnesses, of which 13 were eyewitnesses who had lost their family members in the mass carnage. “It is important to note that none of the accused disputed the date, time, place and manner of occurrence but still stand acquitted by the impugned judgment on a misreading of the law and evidence on record,” he said.
A bench of Justices S Abdul Nazir and Krishna Murari admitted the state’s appeal after hearing arguments from advocate Abhinav Mukerji, who said that the HC in its May 21 judgment ignored vital eye-witness accounts of the killings that took place over 22 years ago. SC permitted the state to serve notices on the 13 acquitted accused.
It was said that the Maoist organisation perpetrated the massacre allegedly to take revenge for the Ranvir Sena, a private army of upper-caste people, allegedly killing 56 Dalits at Laxmanpur Bathe in 1996 and 23 more at Shankarbigha in 1999. The Bihar government told the SC that these caste-violence incidents are from its “dark period of history”.
The prosecution case, believed by the trial court, was that “the accused belonged to the lower-caste extremist outfit MCC and had carried out the attack against unarmed and defenceless members of the upper-caste people with a view to establish their supremacy and is a fallout of the unfortunate caste based conflicts that ravaged the state ”.
Mukerji said the HC erred in acquitting the accused even though the case of the prosecution was supported by as many as 23 witnesses, of which 13 were eyewitnesses who had lost their family members in the mass carnage. “It is important to note that none of the accused disputed the date, time, place and manner of occurrence but still stand acquitted by the impugned judgment on a misreading of the law and evidence on record,” he said.
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