MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court has acquitted a 38-year-old man who was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of his female friend, whose dismembered body was dumped in plastic bags at different locations in Chembur. The court held that the prosecution failed to prove the murder charge beyond reasonable doubt and ordered his release after he had spent nearly 12-and-a-half years in prison.A division bench of justices Manish Pitale and Shreeram Shirsath set aside the murder conviction of Prabhakar Shetty, observing that the prosecution had failed to establish the complete chain of circumstantial evidence necessary to sustain a conviction.“The prosecution has failed to establish, beyond reasonable doubt, several material incriminating circumstances which constituted the essential links in the chain of circumstantial evidence against the appellant for the offence of murder,” the bench said.However, the court upheld Shetty’s conviction for destruction of evidence and the two-year sentence imposed for that offence, which he has already served.According to the prosecution, the case came to light on October 29, 2013, when assistant sub-inspector Hanumant Patil of Chembur police station noticed a crowd near Charai Lake during a patrol. Locals informed him that two men had arrived in an autorickshaw, dumped a large plastic bag into the water and fled.Police recovered the bag and found the torso of a woman, estimated to be between 25 and 30 years old. The following day, another black plastic bag containing severed legs was recovered near Trombay Jetty.Investigators later traced the autorickshaw allegedly used to dispose of the torso, leading to Shetty’s arrest on November 5, 2013. The victim was identified as Kanti Shetty, a Sakinaka resident who had been reported missing.The prosecution claimed that after his arrest, Shetty led police to Sai Baba Nagar in Chembur East, where the victim’s head was recovered. Police also claimed that Kanti was killed after repeatedly insisting on marriage, leading to frequent quarrels between the two, and that the knife allegedly used in the murder was recovered at Shetty’s instance.Following a trial in which the prosecution examined 25 witnesses, a Mumbai sessions court on December 8, 2020 convicted Shetty of murder and destruction of evidence. Holding that the chain of circumstantial evidence had been proved beyond reasonable doubt, the trial court sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder and two years’ imprisonment for destroying evidence.Challenging the verdict, Shetty moved the Bombay High Court. Re-examining the evidence, the high court held that while the prosecution had established the identity of the victim and had also proved a possible motive, frequent disputes between the two over marriage, it failed to establish one of the most crucial links in a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence: that the victim was last seen alive in the exclusive company of the accused.The bench noted that the prosecution relied on the testimony of a resident of Subhash Nagar, where the murder allegedly took place. However, the witness only stated that he had seen a woman entering Shetty’s rented room and did not specifically identify her as Kanti. The court also found the witness unreliable because of contradictions regarding his police statement.The court further observed that Call Detail Records placed both the accused and the victim at the same location at around 7.25 pm on October 29, 2013, but they also indicated the presence of a third person. The prosecution neither identified nor investigated that individual.“The presence of an unknown person negates the prosecution theory that the victim was in the exclusive company of the appellant,” the bench observed while extending the benefit of doubt to Shetty on the murder charge.The high court, however, found sufficient evidence to conclude that Shetty had dumped the bag containing the victim’s torso in Charai Lake. It therefore upheld his conviction for destruction of evidence. Since he had already completed the two-year sentence for that offence during his incarceration, the court directed that he be released from prison.