Meghalaya honeymoon murder-accused labelled ‘army deserter’ in bungled memo

“Some of the entries/contents appears to be ridiculous, for example, ‘You are suspected of being a deserter from any of the Armed Forces of the Union’ and another which reads as ‘You are suspected of being involved in an offence committed outside India’ and yet another entry which reads as ‘You, being a released convict, failed to notify your residence and any change of, or absence from, such residence after release…’,” it said.

“If this is the manner in which the intimation of the grounds of arrest is made, the same reflects a total non-application of judicious mind on the part of the arresting agency, which strikes at the root of the process of arrest of an accused person, leading to this Court to come to the conclusion that the arrestee does have a strong case to contend that no such effective grounds have ever been intimated to her at the initial stage of her arrest,” the court held.

The court also addressed the State’s argument that the repeated references in the arrest documents to Section 403(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita – a non-existent provision – rather than to Section 103(1), which defines murder, were merely typographical slips. “The fact that such an apparent error appears at several portions of the records herein, again, the same reflects non-application of mind by the authorities concerned, which is not fitting an action on their part,” the judgment reads. “The foundational basis for building up a case against the accused/respondent being found lacking, all other attempts to rectify the subsequent actions or process will have to fail.”

The court clarified that it was not commenting on the investigation itself or on the chargesheet and the framing of charges, which remained unquestioned, and that the trial was not vitiated. The defect, it said, lay only in the procedure followed at the point of arrest.

Referring to its earlier order in Labius Arengh v. State of Meghalaya, the court added that the authorities concerned “would do well” to revisit how grounds of arrest are prepared and specifically worded going forward. Having found no effective initial intimation of the grounds of arrest, the court said it did not need to go into the remaining contentions raised by either side and held that the trial court was justified in releasing Sonam on bail on this ground alone.

Raja, a 29-year-old businessman from Indore, married Sonam on May 11, 2025. The couple travelled to Shillong for their honeymoon and later moved on to Sohra, where they went missing on May 23. His body was recovered from a gorge near Weisawdong Falls, and police eventually arrested Sonam along with her alleged partner, Raj Kushwaha, and three men accused of carrying out the killing.

Sonam was arrested on June 9, 2025, from Ghazipur. She spent over ten months in judicial custody before the Additional Deputy Commissioner (Judicial), Shillong, granted her bail on April 27 on the same ground the High Court has now upheld. The State’s petition for cancellation was argued by Advocate General A Kumar, who contended that the grounds of arrest had in substance been conveyed to her, through her brother, through documents bearing her own signature, and through a magistrate’s record from June 11, 2025, noting that she had verbally confirmed awareness of the reasons for her arrest.