Former Union Minister Shibu Soren was released from the Dumka Central Jail on Saturday after the Delhi High Court acquitted him in connection with the case of murder of his private secretary, Shashi Nath Jha.
Dumka (Jharkhand), Aug 25 : Former Union Minister Shibu Soren was released from the Dumka Central Jail on Saturday after the Delhi High Court acquitted him in connection with the case of murder of his private secretary, Shashi Nath Jha.
Earlier, JMM leader release was delayed due to a technical hitch in his release order.
Soren along with four other convicts -- Nand Kishore Mehta, Shailendra Bhattacharya, Pashupati Nath Mehta and Ajay Kumar Mehta -- were acquitted by the court on Wednesday.
"We hold that the prosecution has miserably failed to prove the case," the court said.
The Bench, comprising of Justices R S Sodhi and H R Malhotra also held that the trial court order is far from convincing, adding that "the prosecution (CBI) had failed to prove that the body exhumed was that of Shashi Nath Jha."
A local court had on December 26, 2006 sentenced Soren and four others to life imprisonment for kidnapping and killing Jha.
The JMM leader had challenged his conviction and life sentence in connection with the murder case, which took place in 1992.
In his appeal, Soren challenged the trial court's conviction order on the grounds that the trial judge had ignored the two DNA reports to identify the body of the deceased. He also claimed that every time the report was made available, it had turned out to be negative.
Prosecutors said Jha went missing from the Dhaula Kuan area of Delhi on May 22, 1992, and was last seen in Ranchi in the company of Soren loyalists the next day.
They claim that Jha was later murdered as he allegedly possessed knowledge about the money received by JMM MPs, including Soren, from former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to vote in favour of his minority government in Parliament in 1993.
ANI