The Patna High Court on Wednesday acquitted 13 accused, of them nine men awarded death sentence and four women awarded life imprisonment by a lower court in connection with the Gopalganj hooch tragedy of 2016, in which 19 people had lost their lives.
The court noted that the prosecution had failed to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.
A bench comprising justices Ashwini Kumar Singh and Harish Kumar passed the order on an appeal filed by all the accused against the Goplaganj excise court judgment that had upheld their conviction and sentences awarded by a trial court.
Altogether 19 people had died in the district’s Khajurbani locality on August 16, 2016, after consuming spurious liquor, four months after the Nitish Kumar government banned sale and consumption of alcohol across the state.
“The impugned judgment of conviction dated February 26, 2021, and the consequent order of sentence dated March 5, 2021, passed by the learned additional district & sessions Judge-II-cum-special judge (Excise Act), Gopalganj are, hereby, set aside. The appellants are acquitted of the charges levelled against them. They shall be released from jail forthwith unless they are required in any other case,” said the order that runs into 89 pages.
The court noted that one Bandhu Ram, according to police, was the first person who disclosed about the entire incident to the local police station house officer (SHO), but he was neither made a witness in the charge sheet nor the investigating officer met him during the entire investigation.
The SHO did not even bother to record the oral statement of Bandhu Ram and started the investigation without registration of an FIR (first information report). He went to the place of occurrence, raided several houses, prepared search-cum-seizure lists, recorded his self-statement at 10:15 pm on August 17, 2016, almost 22 hours after getting the information regarding a cognizable offence from Bandhu Ram, and registered the FIR at 09:30 am on August 18, the court noted, saying all this creates suspicion about the initiation of the criminal prosecution in the present case.
Counsel for the appellant, Kanhaiya Prasad Singh, argued that the prosecution neither brought on record the names of those persons who died of spurious liquor or the autopsy report of even one of them.
The judges also found that except seven police officials, no independent witness had been examined in this case.
In Bihar, approximately 125 people have died in hooch tragedies since November 2021, officials of the excise department said. There are no figures available with the government on the total number of such deaths since April 2016, when the law came into force.
