A Mumbai sessions court has acquitted Mohammed Shaikh in the 2021 robbery-murder of railway commuter Niraj Jaiswar, holding that serious gaps in CCTV handling, witness identification and forensic evidence made it impossible to establish his involvement beyond reasonable doubt.
Shaikh had spent more than five years in jail after being charged with robbery, murder and destruction of evidence in the case registered at CSMT railway police station. Additional Sessions Judge R S Aradhye said the investigation process appeared to have been conducted in a manner that raised suspicion and that the prosecution had failed to establish a complete chain of circumstances linking Shaikh to the crime.
The case related to a local train that arrived at CSMT from Panvel at about 10.47 pm on March 29, 2021. A man was found unconscious and injured in the luggage compartment. Before railway staff and police could attend to him at CSMT, the train departed towards Panvel. A deputy station manager alerted Wadala railway station, where police constable Ranjit Mane entered the compartment, found the injured passenger and shifted him to Sion Hospital. The man 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 remove evidence by cleaning the weapon and his clothes. Its case relied largely on CCTV footage from Govandi, Kurla and Dockyard Road railway stations, footage from a tea stall near GTB station, the 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 alleged that Shaikh was seen cleaning a knife between 10.07 pm and 10.55 pm. However, other material indicated that Jaiswar was alive at Kurla railway station during the same period and possibly later. The judge noted that the prosecution’s own evidence showed that Jaiswar was alive between 10.07 pm and 10.21 pm, when Shaikh was allegedly seen cleaning the knife.
The court also found that the CCTV footage had not been shown to members of either family or to an independent witness for identification. It held that merely recognising people in footage, without a reliable identification procedure, was insufficient. 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. A certificate had been issued only for the tea-stall footage.
The court further noted that no direct eyewitness had seen Shaikh and Jaiswar board the same train or travel together. It also found no witness who established a last-seen circumstance connecting the two immediately before the death. Although articles including a knife were allegedly recovered from the house of Shaikh’s brother, the brother was not examined as a witness and his statement was not recorded.
Medical evidence established that Jaiswar’s death was unnatural and resulted from shock caused by multiple stab injuries. However, the doctor who examined the knife could not conclusively confirm that it was the weapon used in the offence. Blood grouping on the knife was inconclusive, no conclusive DNA report was available, and a forensic report found no blood on the cloth allegedly used to clean it.
The court held that the medical evidence established the cause of death but did not connect Shaikh to the crime. It consequently acquitted him of all charges. The ruling places the handling and certification of railway-station CCTV, witness identification and forensic material at the centre of the case’s outcome.
