Mumbai: With senior police officers giving inconsistent statements about the sequence of events in a fake currency case, a sessions court recently took a serious view. It noted that the witnesses are not illiterate or rustic, and giving evidence in such a way lends a shadow of doubt to the genuineness of the prosecution’s case.
Making these observations, the court acquitted a 30-year-old labourer, Dobirul Shaikh, six years after he was accused of attempting to buy a sari with counterfeit Rs 2,000 notes and also possessing 12 other such notes.The prosecution claimed that the sari shop owner had filed the complaint at NM Joshi Marg police station after the cops completed the procedure of seizure and preparing panchnama, but a senior inspector who was part of the investigations said that after completing the procedures, the team returned to the crime branch office and then the complaint was lodged.
“The evidence that came on record… demonstrates that the prosecution has not proved beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was found in possession of counterfeit currency notes and he had trafficked or circulated those notes as genuine,” the judge said.
It was pointed out that the prosecution had not explained where the notes recovered were kept till they were sent to the currency note press in Nashik and the RBI about 20 days later.
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