Shibu Soren - Life Imprisonment and Acquittal

Life Imprisonment and Acquittal

On 28 November 2006, Soren was found guilty in a twelve year old case involving the kidnapping and murder of his former personal secretary Shashinath Jha. It was claimed that Jha was abducted from the Dhaula Kuan area in Delhi on May 22, 1994 and taken to Piska Nagari village near Ranchi where he was killed. The CBI chargesheet stated that Jha's knowledge of the reported deal between the Congress and the JMM to save the then Narasimha Rao government during the July 1993 no-confidence motion and an act of sodomy was the motive behind the murder. The charge-sheet asserted that: "Jha was aware of the illegal transactions and also expected and demanded a substantial share out of this amount from Soren."

Soren has resigned from his post of Union Minister for Coal after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanded that he do so in the wake of the verdict. This is the first case of a Union Minister of the Government of India being found guilty of involvement in a murder. On 5 December 2006, Shibu Soren was sentenced to life imprisonment. A Delhi court rejected his bail plea, stating: 'We cannot overlook the fact that the appellant (Soren) has been convicted after a detailed and elaborate trial only in November 2006 and sentenced in December 2006.

The bench also noted that he was also being tried in a number of other cases, including the case of mass murder in Jharkhand. '

On June 25, 2007, Shibu Soren was being escorted to his jail in Dumka, Jharkhand when his convoy was attacked by bombs, but no one was hurt.

Subsequently however, the court pulled up the prosecuting attorney, R M Tiwari of the (Central Bureau of Investigation), for "not doing its homework" and presenting weak evidence.

The Delhi High Court on 23 Aug 2007 overruled the District Court and acquitted Soren, . stating that "the prosecution has miserably failed in bringing home the charge against the accused persons. The trial court's analysis is far from convincing and not sustainable."

The five men convicted by the Tis Hazari court were held guilty of criminal conspiracy, abduction and murder primarily on the basis of forensic evidence provided by a post-mortem report of a body discovered in Jharkhand, namely a skull superimposition test and skull injury report. This was in addition to eyewitness accounts and some circumstantial evidence. But the DNA that had been extracted from the skeleton did not match Jha's immediate family: in its judgement overruling the district court, the High Court bench wondered how the trial judge could have "ignored the well-established fact that a DNA test is considered conclusive evidence while skull superimposition tests only allude to a probability", concluding that the skeleton was not Jha and that the case reduced to merely circumstantial evidence.