PATNA: Former Bihar MP and don-turned-politician Mohammad Shahabuddin was on Monday acquitted in a 28-year-old triple murder case in Jamshedpur for want of evidence.
Additional district and sessions judge Ajit Kumar Singh said the prosecution failed to convince him that the former Rashtriya Janata Dal MP from Siwan in Bihar that the evidence furnished was valid for a conviction.
Shahabuddin is currently lodged in the Tihar jail in Delhi. He appeared before the court through video-conferencing.
The case relates to the murder of former Jamshedpur Youth Congress president Pradeep Mishra and two others, Anand Rao and Janardan Choubey. They were shot dead by unidentified assailants near the Tata Steel power house in the Jugsalai area of Jamshedpur on February 2, 1989. The three men were travelling in Mishra’s car, on which the assailants fired and killed them on the spot.
Eight people, including Shahabuddin and former Bihar MLA Rama Singh, were named as accused in the first information report lodged by Mishra’s bodyguard Brahmeshwar Pathak. While three of them died during the trial, four others, including Rama Singh, were acquitted on April 26, 2006, also for want of evidence.
This is the third acquittal for Shahabuddin, a four-term MP from Siwan who used to be a terror in Bihar, especially in the state’s western parts, in the mid-1990s and early 2000s during the RJD’s 15-year rule in Bihar.
Last year, RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav nominated Shahabuddin as a vice-president of the party though he was in jail at the time.;
The 50-year-old Shahabuddin is facing 32 cases of murder, extortion and kidnapping. He has been convicted in five of them and has been in jail since 2006, serving life sentences in two murder cases.
He was shifted from the Siwan jail to the Tihar jail in Delhi in February 2017 as per the order of the Supreme Court, which rejected the bail granted to him by the Patna High Court.