Hindustan Times ·
After 10 years in jail, HC acquits man convicted of wife’s murder
A trial court had convicted Rakesh Naukudkar, 43, who worked as a service advisor at an automobile service centre in Kalyan, for strangulating his wife Savita with a wire and banging her head against the stony ground in Navi Mumbai
Mumbai After spending a decade in jail for murdering his wife, a life-convict is set to walk out of the Mumbai Central prison after the Bombay High Court recently held that the circumstantial evidence, including the injury on his hand and a blood-stained handkerchief found in his two-wheeler, was not enough to establish the man’s guilt.
A trial court had convicted Rakesh Naukudkar, 43, who worked as a service advisor at an automobile service centre in Kalyan, for strangulating his wife Savita with a wire and banging her head against the stony ground in Navi Mumbai while they were on their way back home on their motorcycle.
Rakesh, who worked in Kalyan, would pick up his wife Savita from her office in Kharghar daily and they would come back to their Worli home together on their two-wheeler. On February 9, 2016, Rakesh claimed that Savita did not turn up when he went to Kharghar to pick her up. The next day, he lodged a missing complaint at NRI Sagari police station in Navi Mumbai and Savita’s body was found the next day near Belapur. Suspecting Rakesh’s involvement, the police arrested him a day later.
The police said they found a wire Rakesh allegedly used for strangulating Savita and traced it back to the shop it was brought from. They also examined the call details of Rakesh, Savita and a woman that he was allegedly having an affair with. The police’s case was that Rakesh, who was having an extra-marital affair, wanted to get rid of Savita who refused to divorce him. On their way back home on February 9, 2016, he allegedly murdered her and then pretended to make enquiries with relatives the next day before lodging the missing complaint. One of the incriminating circumstances, the trial court held, was a blood-stained handkerchief found in the dickey of his two-wheeler.
According to Rakesh, when Savita’s body was found, he said, he wiped it with a handkerchief, a fact that was being used against him. He insisted he had no dispute with his wife.
The doctor who conducted the post mortem said that the cause of death was not strangling but head injury. The defence argued that the blood found on the handkerchief was of the blood group AB. While Rakesh’s blood group was A, the prosecution could not prove that Savita’s was AB. “Unless there was a connection between the blood found on the handkerchief with the blood of the deceased, it cannot be termed as an incriminating circumstance,” the High Court said.
Justices Sarang Kotwal and RR Bhosale said that the motive of Rakesh’s alleged affair “is not proved beyond reasonable doubt and, in any case, it is a weak piece of evidence in this case”. Questioning the prosecution’s case, the court also said, “It is difficult to believe that he (Rakesh) offered clues to the police station within whose jurisdiction the dead body was lying”.
The injury on his hand too, the court said, “did not unerringly point only to the hypothesis of having suffered the injuries during the incident”. He serviced vehicles and, therefore, it was not unusual, the court observed.