Witness credibility in doubt, 2 cleared of '05 passport forgery
Mumbai: Raising doubts about the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses, a court has acquitted two south Mumbai residents who were accused of procuring passports by forgery and impersonation and attempting to travel to Dubai with them nearly 20 years ago.Additional chief judicial magistrate Vinod Patil cleared Abdul Rashid Ahmed Mistry (84), and Zuber Noor Mohammad Chali (64) of cheating, forgery, breach of trust and
criminal conspiracy
.
According to the prosecution, based on a lookout notice, Mistry was intercepted at the city airport just before he could board a flight to Dubai under the alias Shoeb Ahmed Raza on Nov 19, 2005. During questioning, he allegedly revealed his identity and admitted to obtaining a passport using forged documents.The court noted that an immigration official deposed that a person named Shoeb Ahmed Raza submitted his passport and boarding pass at his counter and the documents matched the name on the lookout notice.
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"He was the best person who could have identified the accused. However, he did not identify him," it said. It added that had the prosecution successfully established that the documents had been seized from the custody of the accused, then the onus of proving his innocence would have been on him. "But except for the investigating officer, no one has stated that those documents were seized from the accused... Panch witness Iqbal Rizvi... did not support the prosecution," the judge said.The accused's counsel Aftab Qureshi said the prosecution did not produce any credible or independent evidence. "The case was based on unsubstantiated oral statements, lacking any corroboration."Sahar police had lodged the case, which was later transferred to DCB CID unit 8. The chargesheet was filed in Feb 2006 and charges framed in Nov 2008, but the trial began only in March 2015.
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