New Delhi, August 22
Former union minister and JMM leader Shibu Soren, undergoing life sentence for plotting the murder of his secretary, was today acquitted by the Delhi High Court due to lack of evidence.

Allowing Soren’s appeal, a Bench of Justices R.S. Sodhi and H.R. Malhotra found the CBI’s evidence insufficient to nail him down for conspiring the killing of his aide Shashi Nath Jha to prevent from revealing party MPs’ bribery scandal of which Soren allegedly was a key player.

The court also acquitted Soren’s four associates — Nand Kishore Mehta, Shailendra Bhattacharya, Pashupati Nath Mehta and Ajay Kumar Mehta — who had been awarded life imprisonment for executing the murder at his instance.

Soren, who had to quit the Manmohan Singh government after his conviction on November 28, 2006, is presently lodged in Jamtara jail. He was immediately taken into custody after Sessions Judge B.R. Kedia had pronounced the quantum of sentence on December 5.

The CBI had charged Soren of hatching a conspiracy to get rid of Jha after he threatened to expose him for taking bribe for extending support to the minority Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao during the July 1993 no-confidence motion faced by it.

The CBI had charged him and his associates of executing the murder at Piska Nagri near Ranchi in Jharkhand in 1994 after kidnapping Jha from the Dhaula Kuan area in New Delhi. His body was buried close to a graveyard there.

“We hold that the prosecution has miserably failed to prove the case … the trial court order is far from convincing and hence we set it aside,” the Bench ruled.

The trial court had based its order on CBI’s evidence of exhumed skeletal remains and the DNA test, which the agency claimed to have confirmed that the body was that of Jha. It did not cut ice with the High Court as it found the conclusion doubtful.

The CBI was not able to prove beyond doubt that the skeletal remains were actually that of Jha, the Bench said.

The 62-year-old JMM leader, popularly know as guruji in the tribal areas of Jharkhand, is credited with launching a successful agitation for the creation of a separate state. He is also facing murder charges in the Chrudih massacre case, which is under trial.

In view of the acquittal of the accused, the court ordered that they be release from jail if they were not lodged there in connection with any other case.

The UPA welcomed the acquittal of Soren, who was the coal and mines minister, before he was forced to resign after his conviction.