A Mumbai sessions court has acquitted Mohammed Shaikh in the 2021 robbery-murder of railway commuter Niraj Jaiswar, finding that investigators failed to establish a reliable chain of circumstantial evidence and did not properly authenticate key CCTV footage used against him.
Shaikh had spent more than five years in jail after being charged with robbery, murder and destruction of evidence in the case registered at the CSMT railway police station. Additional Sessions Judge R S Aradhye said the investigation process appeared to have been conducted in a manner that raised serious suspicion about the implication of the accused.
The case concerned Jaiswar, who was found fatally injured in the luggage compartment of a local train that arrived at CSMT from Panvel on March 29, 2021, at about 10.47 pm. Before railway staff and police could attend to him at CSMT, the train departed towards Panvel again. A deputy station manager alerted Wadala railway station, where police constable Ranjit Mane entered the compartment and shifted the injured man to Sion Hospital. Jaiswar was declared dead before admission.
The prosecution alleged that Shaikh had robbed Jaiswar of his mobile phone and wallet, attacked him with a knife and later tried to destroy evidence by cleaning the weapon and removing blood from his clothes. Its case relied on CCTV footage from Govandi, Kurla and Dockyard Road railway stations, footage from a tea stall near GTB station, the alleged recovery of a knife and other articles, and forensic reports.
The court found inconsistencies in the timing shown in the CCTV material. One part of the prosecution case allegedly placed Shaikh cleaning a knife between 10.07 pm and 10.55 pm, while other material indicated that Jaiswar was alive at Kurla railway station during and after part of that period. The judge noted that the prosecution’s own material showed that Jaiswar was alive from 10.07 pm to 10.21 pm when Shaikh was allegedly seen cleaning the knife.
The CCTV material was also not shown to Jaiswar’s family, Shaikh’s family or an independent witness for identification. The court held that merely recognising individuals in footage, without a reliable identification procedure, was insufficient. It further noted that there was no direct eyewitness who saw the two men board the same train or travel together, and that no witness established a last-seen circumstance linking Shaikh to Jaiswar immediately before his death.
The court also identified gaps in the handling of electronic evidence. Apart from a certificate relating to the tea-stall footage, the prosecution had not produced mandatory certificates for the CCTV footage retrieved from the three railway stations or for copying data from pen drives into DVDs. These procedural requirements became central to the court’s assessment of whether the footage could be relied upon.
The recovery evidence was similarly found incomplete. Articles including a knife were allegedly recovered from the house of Shaikh’s brother, but the brother was neither examined as a witness nor had his statement been recorded. The judge said he would have been the best witness to establish Shaikh’s knowledge, conscious possession or control over the articles.
Medical evidence confirmed that Jaiswar died an unnatural death caused by shock resulting from multiple stab injuries. However, the doctor who examined the knife could not conclusively confirm that it was the weapon used in the crime. Blood grouping on the knife was inconclusive, there was no conclusive DNA report, and a forensic report found no blood on the cloth allegedly used by Shaikh to clean the weapon.
The court said the prosecution had failed to prove the charges beyond the required standard. The acquittal underscores how failures in preserving, certifying and identifying digital and forensic evidence can determine the outcome of cases arising within Mumbai’s heavily used suburban railway network.
