Chintan Upadhyay moves Bombay HC, questions use of retracted statement

In the appeal filed through his lawyers Raja Thakare and Bharat Manghani, Chintan said that the trial court convicted him only on the basis of a confession given by his co-accused Pradeep Rajbhar.

The confession, Chintan submitted, was retracted by Pradeep and hence should not have been relied on by the court. He also submitted that apart from one point about an alleged meeting between Chintan and the other co-accused in Chembur, before the murder, the court had said that the other facts mentioned in the confession were not corroborated.

The appeal said that relying on such a confession in a case with only circumstantial evidence was not permissible under law. The appeal also said that while the trial court concluded that the other co-accused had no independent motive to kill Hema and hence said that Chintan was involved in the conspiracy, there cannot be an inference to convict him. The appeal also said that the court had itself said that it could not rely on sketches and paintings made by Chintan to show that he was involved.

On December 11, 2015, the bodies of Hema and her lawyer Harish Bhambhani were found dumped in a nullah in Kandivali. The trial court earlier this month found Chintan guilty of abetting and conspiring to murder Hema, while it found three others, Pradeep, Vijay and Shivkumar, guilty of murdering Hema and Bhambhani along with other charges.

The appeal filed on behalf of Chintan also states that while the prosecution had claimed that there was a conspiracy to murder both Hema and her lawyer, the court had found that there was no plan to murder him but that he was killed as he accompanied her on the day of the incident.

Chintan, who spent six years in jail since his arrest in 2015, was granted bail by the Supreme Court in 2021. After he was convicted, he was arrested and sent to jail again. The appeal seeks his release on bail till the final disposal of the petition.