NEW DELHI: Yusuf Mohsin Nulwalla, co-convict and close friend of Bollywood superstar Sanjay Dutt who is serving a five-year jail term for destroying a AK-56 rifle of the actor, today moved the Supreme Court seeking reduction of his sentence claiming that the gun was not an automatic one as held by all the courts.
A bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Prafulla C Pant asked senior lawyer Harish Salve, appearing for Nulwalla, to file a curative petition to raise the alleged new ground for seeking reduction in sentence.
The bench said the convict should have filed a curative petition as this remedy was yet to be exhausted. Nulwalla has claimed he has wrongly been convicted and sentenced for possessing a prohibited automatic AK-56 assault gun while he was shown to be possessing a non-prohibited semi -automatic-AK-56 and the fact has remained unnoticed.
The bench kept Nulwalla's plea seeking reduction of the five-year jail term to three years pending and asked him to file a curative petition on the matter.
The apex court had upheld the conviction and the five- year sentence of Nulwalla, a close friend of Dutt who was held guilty of destroying the weapons kept at the actor's house.
According to CBI, Nulwalla had picked up the weapons from Dutt's house and taken them to Adjania and destroyed them. The actor was convicted in November 2006 for illegal possession of a 9mm pistol and an AK-56 rifle but was acquitted of more serious charges of criminal conspiracy under the now-defunct anti-terror TADA.
On March 12, 1993, Mumbai was rocked by a series of blasts engineered by fundamentalist elements, which claimed almost 300 lives and damaged property worth over Rs 27 crore.
The Supreme Court, in 2013, had brought a closure to the appeals by the convicts and the state in the case and upheld the death sentence of Yakub Abdul Razak Memon, brother of one of the absconding main conspirators Tiger Memon, and life sentences of 16 of the 18 convicts.
While Memon was executed on July 30, the death sentence of 10 others was commuted to life by the court which directed that they will remain in prison till death.