Restore Salman’s jail term: Maha to SC

Hit-&-run case

Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, February 5

The Maharashtra Government today pleaded with the Supreme Court to restore the five-year sentence awarded to Bollywood actor Salman Khan in the 2002 hit-and-run accident case in which one person was killed and four others injured.

Challenging the subsequent acquittal of Salman by the Bombay High Court, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said the HC’s reasoning for its judgment was much more than being “perverse and improper”, the pre-requisite for setting it aside. This had resulted in complete travesty of justice and acquittal of the accused.

The HC had ignored crucial pieces of evidence and statements by key witnesses that had established the actor’s guilt — he was at the wheel, not his driver, in a drunken state and ran away from the accident site without bothering about taking the victims to hospital.

The driver theory was introduced in the case more than 13 years after the September 20, 2002 accident and precisely for this reason the trial court had rejected the claim of driver Ashok Brahmdev Singh, the AG pleaded. But the HC accepted the driver story despite the fact that he and Salman had remained silent on this aspect for so many years.

If the driver theory was true, the first thing Salman would have done was to make him surrender to the police, Rohatgi said.

The alcohol content in Salman’s blood was double that of the permissible limit despite the fact that the sample was collected 12 hours after the accident, he said.

Appearing for Salman, senior advocate Kapil Sibal questioned the veracity of the English translation of the statements relied upon by the AG and sought to file the official version. The court accepted the plea and posted the case for further hearing on February 12.