Man died playing with gun in 2010, finds SC, acquits friend | India News

NEW DELHI: The friendship between Vaibhav and Mangesh, who studied homeopathy, came to a tragic end in Sept 2010, when Mangesh, while playing with Vaibhav’s father’s service gun, accidentally shot himself fatally. A panic-stricken Vaibhav dumped the body and cleaned up the scene of the accident. The trial court and Bombay high court concurrently convicted him of murder in 2012. Over a decade later, Supreme Court acquitted Vaibhav of murder charges.The trial court had believed the prosecution’s version of events – that Vaibhav killed Mangesh using his father’s service gun when the latter came to drop him home after college. He then called two of his friends to help dispose of the body and clean the blood stains at the scene of the crime. HC had dismissed his appeal.In SC, the bullet’s trajectory came to Vaibhav’s rescue. Case ticks boxes of accidental gunshot injury, rules SC The bullet had exited from the downward portion of Mangesh’s skull and then hit the ventilator above the door. His counsel argued that such a trajectory was only possible in case of a suicidal death and not homicidal. On the conduct of the accused, the counsel said the young man panicked seeing his friend motionless in a pool of blood. Fearing his father’s wrath, he dumped the body and cleaned the scene ofhis friend’s accidental death.A bench of justices B V Nagarathna and Satish C Sharma said, “No doubt, the deceased was shot by the pistol belonging to the father of the appellant and in the house of the appellant, but the pertinent question that craves for an answer is – who pulled the trigger? Despite two rounds of litigation, the question is yet to find answer.”Doing the work of a detective with a keen eye for details, the bench said while the trajectory of the bullet was admittedly upwards as it hit the ventilator, which was at a much higher level than the height of the deceased, the prosecution’s story was that Vaibhav shot Mangesh in the eye without proving the trajectory of the bullet.Writing the judgment, Justice Sharma said, “The prosecution version remains acceptable only till the point of entry of the bullet through the eye, but it starts becoming cloudy when the upward trajectory of the bullet is analysed further… Such a trajectory of the bullet could have been possible only if the deceased was sitting and looking downwards towards the barrel of the pistol from a close distance. It was only then that the bullet could have hit the ventilator despite exiting from the lower part of the skull.” “The present case ticks the boxes of an accidental gunshot injury, both in theory and in fact,” the bench said while acquitting Vaibhav of murder charges.