Bombay HC frees man serving life for 2012 Kandivali child kidnap-murder as every link in the chain fails
A division bench found the last-seen witnesses unreliable, the ransom-call recording unproved, the recovery of the body tainted by a stock panch and the fathers prior disclosure of the spot, and the SIM evidence bare of call records or a Section 65B certificate, and acquitted Manishprasad Gaud of murder, kidnapping and destroying evidence.
A man convicted of kidnapping and murdering a five-year-old boy in Kandivali, Mumbai, in August 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment has been acquitted by the Bombay High Court, which held on 29 October 2026 that not one of the four circumstances the prosecution relied on had been proved. A division bench of Justice Manish Pitale and Justice Shreeram V. Shirsat found the two last-seen witnesses unworthy of credit, the ransom-call recording and the SIM card unproved for want of call records and a Section 65B certificate, and the recovery of the child’s body compromised by the investigating officer’s own admission that the father had disclosed the spot before the accused did. Justice Shirsat wrote the judgment.
A missing child, ransom calls, and an arrest traced through a phone number
The appellant, Manishprasad Narsingh Gaud, lodged at Nagpur Central Prison, challenged the judgment of 5 May 2018 by which the Sessions Court for Greater Bombay at Dindoshi convicted him in Sessions Case No. 06 of 2013 under Sections 363, 302 and 201 of the Indian Penal Code. He was sentenced to five years for kidnapping, life for murder and two years for causing disappearance of evidence, all to run consecutively.
The prosecution case was that the complainant, a resident of Ekta Nagar Welfare Society in Kandivali West, returned from work on 26 August 2012 to learn that his younger son had gone out to play with his elder brother and not come back. A missing complaint was lodged that day. On 28 August, at about 3.15 pm, the complainant received a call from a man calling himself Raja, from the number 9172060843, who claimed to have the child and later demanded Rs 50,000 to be handed to one Balli at Kandivali railway station at 8 pm. An FIR against unknown persons under Section 363 was registered at 10.15 pm that night. Further calls followed on 29 August, summoning the complainant to Santacruz station, where nobody turned up, and on 30 August, when the caller said the boy would be home by 4.30 pm.
Investigation of the phone numbers, the prosecution said, led to the appellant, who was arrested on 30 August 2012 and allegedly made a disclosure the next day leading to the discovery of the child’s body. He and a co-accused, Samir Baig, were charge-sheeted under Sections 363, 364-A, 302 and 201 read with Sections 34 and 120-B. The trial court rejected the ransom motive but convicted the appellant on the remaining counts.
Four circumstances on one side, twenty-nine authorities on the other
Mr. Prashant Pandey, with Ms. Riddhima Mangaonkar, Ms. Neha Balani and Mr. Dinesh Jadhwani, instructed by W3 Legal LLP, argued for the appellant that the case rested entirely on circumstantial evidence built on four limbs: last seen together, the SIM card from which the ransom calls were made, the recovery of the body at the appellant’s instance, and the medical and forensic evidence. None, he said, was established. The trial court had itself rejected the ransom motive; the police already knew where the body lay, so its recovery was no discovery under Section 27 of the Evidence Act; PW 5’s statement was recorded fifteen days late; the five-day gap before the recovery left room for an intervening hand; the SIM was never attributed by proof, the CD technician was not examined, the complainant did not identify the voice and the voice expert’s report was negative; and the panch witnesses were habitual panchas. He relied on twenty-nine decisions from Hanumant and Pulukuri Kottaya to Sharad Birdhichand Sarda, Anvar P.V. and O.M. Cherian.
Dr. Dhanlakshmi S. Krishnaiyer, Additional Public Prosecutor, answered that each circumstance had been proved by cogent evidence and that together they formed a complete chain. The body was discovered on the appellant’s information; PW 5 and PW 6 were unshaken in cross-examination; the delay in recording PW 5’s statement caused no prejudice; and panchas who had acted before could not be discarded without proof of bias. She cited Nagarajan v. State of Tamil Nadu, Rohit Jangde v. State of Chhattisgarh, Periyasamy and Shyamal Ghosh.
The bench reorganises the circumstances and tests each one
The court began with the framework it had applied in Prabhakar Kutty Shetty v. State of Maharashtra in July 2026, drawing on the Supreme Court’s April 2026 decision in Anand Jakkappa Pujari v. State of Karnataka, which restated the five Sharad Birdhichand Sarda conditions for a circumstantial conviction. Finding that the trial court had not properly spelt out the circumstances, the bench reclassified them under seven heads and took each in turn.
On last seen, PW 5, Chandrabhan Chouhan, said he saw two men he knew as Manish and Baliram alight from an autorickshaw with a child and walk towards the creek on 26 August 2012, and identified the appellant in the dock. But he admitted knowing the boy was missing, helping in the search and visiting the police station after the body was found, yet he told nobody, not the police, not his brother, not the father he said he knew, that he had seen the men with the child. His statement was recorded on 15 September, fifteen days later, and the detail about the creek was an omission from it. Citing Ganesh Bhavan Patel on delayed statements and Ganpat Kondiba Chavan on a witness who keeps an incident to himself, the bench said PW 5 “appears to be a got up witness”.
PW 6, Datta alias Kunal Ashtul, an acquaintance introduced to the appellant by a woman named Deepa, said the appellant telephoned him on 25 August asking him to keep a boy, and on 26 August met him at Machhi Market, Charkop, with Balli and a five-year-old, repeating the request, which he declined because he lived with his uncle. But there were no call detail records for either call; the two friends he said were with him, and Deepa herself, had their statements recorded but were never examined; he had himself been a suspect held at the police station for four or five days; and he learnt the accused’s name from the police. It would be hazardous, the court said, to rest a last-seen finding on his uncorroborated word. The five-day gap before the body was found on 31 August, with no time of death fixed by the doctor, did not exclude a third person, and applying Bodhraj, Nizam and Kanhaiya Lal the bench held last seen neither proved nor, in any event, sufficient on its own.
Ransom calls the father did not mention when he lodged the FIR
The motive of ransom rested on the complainant, PW 1. He described calls demanding Rs 50,000 on pain of the child being killed, but his account of calls between 29 and 31 August was an omission from his police statement, and although he said he received the first ransom call at about 3.15 pm on 28 August, he did not mention it when he lodged the FIR at 10.15 pm the same day. That silence, the court said, went against his credibility. The voice samples went to the expert about a month later with no panchnama covering the seizure of the phone, and the expert’s report was never exhibited; the trial court itself recorded that it was negative for the appellant. Motive therefore failed, and following Anwar Ali v. State of Himachal Pradesh the bench treated its absence as a factor in the accused’s favour.
The recording itself fared no better. The investigating officer, PW 12, said PW 1 disclosed the recording only seven or eight days later, that the handset could not show the time, date or calls, and that PW 1 had never identified the caller’s voice; PW 1’s claim that he guessed it to be the appellant’s, a former neighbour, was itself an omission. Applying the conditions for tape-recorded evidence in Ram Singh v. Col. Ram Singh and R.M. Malkani, which the bench held apply equally to a recording on a mobile phone, it found the conversation unproved and the caller unidentified.
A body the father had already located, shown by a panch who read the panchnama at home
The autopsy by PW 9, Dr. Sanjay Jadhav, on 1 September 2012 found fractures of the left and right temporal, left parietal and frontal bones in a body too decomposed to show external injuries, and the bench accepted that the death was homicidal. Whether the appellant caused it was another matter. PW 1 said the appellant led the police and him to bushes near a MHADA housing society, five minutes’ walk from the residential area, where he identified his son by his clothes. PW 2, Mukesh Mehta, the panch, said the appellant volunteered at Kandivali police station on 31 August to show where he had killed the boy and hidden the body, directed the police vehicle to Ganesh Nagar in the MHADA colony, walked about fifty feet into the scrub and pointed out the body and a stone lying nearby.
Cross-examination showed PW 2 had acted as a panch in thirteen cases for Kandivali police station, had been given a copy of the panchnama a month or two before testifying and had read it at home, and said this was his regular practice. The court did not hold that a repeat panch can never be believed, but found his nexus with the police too close for comfort. More damaging was PW 12’s admission that the complainant had disclosed the particular place in a statement of 31 August 2012 and the body was found at that very spot, and that until 4 pm that day the accused had not disclosed any place. PW 1 had also seen the appellant handcuffed in the police station, contradicting the panch. Measured against Jaffar Hussain Dastagir, which requires the discovery to flow from the accused’s information, the recovery of the body was not proved beyond reasonable doubt as a circumstance against the appellant.
A SIM card, a Nokia handset and no call records
PW 3 proved the recovery, on 5 September 2012, of clothes and a red-and-black Nokia phone from the appellant’s home, and PW 10 the recovery, on 8 September, of a SIM card bearing the number 9172060843 from the co-accused Samir Baig’s almirah, the very number from which the ransom calls had come. But that was as far as it went. Neither call detail records nor the nodal officers’ reports were exhibited to show that the SIM was used in the appellant’s handset, and no certificate under Section 65B of the Evidence Act was produced. Relying on Mustkeem v. State of Rajasthan, which holds that a Section 27 discovery does not by itself prove the offence and that the prosecution must link the object to the crime, and on the Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Pooranmal v. State of Rajasthan reaffirming Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer on the necessity of the Section 65B certificate, the bench declined to treat either recovery as pointing to guilt.
The chemical analyser’s report showed blood on five of the eight articles sent, including the stone, but the grouping results were inconclusive and connected nothing to the appellant.
Kidnapping fails with the last-seen evidence
Having found homicide but no proof of its author, the bench held that “the prosecution has utterly failed to prove the chain of circumstances” and invoked Kali Ram v. State of Himachal Pradesh on the benefit of doubt where two views are possible. The kidnapping conviction under Section 363 fell with the last-seen evidence. Reading Section 361 with the three-judge decision in Anversinh v. State of Gujarat, which holds that recovery of a missing minor from a stranger does not by itself prove kidnapping and that the prosecution must prove the taking or enticing was by or at the instigation of the accused, the court found no evidence that the appellant removed the child from his parents’ custody. PW 6’s account raised suspicion, but “suspicion however strong cannot take place of proof”. With no substantive offence proved, the Section 201 charge could not stand either.
The bench added a note on sentence. Even had the convictions survived, the trial court could not have ordered the life sentence to run consecutively with the fixed terms. It quoted O.M. Cherian v. State of Kerala, under which a fixed-term sentence must run concurrently with life imprisonment because life means jail until the end of natural life, and the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Gopi alias Sahaya Puruna v. State to the same effect.
Order
The appeal was allowed. The conviction and sentence under Sections 302, 363 and 201 of the IPC recorded by the Sessions Court for Greater Bombay at Dindoshi on 5 May 2018 in Sessions Case No. 06 of 2013 were quashed and set aside, and the appellant was acquitted of all charges. He is to be released forthwith unless required in another case, on executing a personal bond of Rs 50,000 under Section 481 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, to secure his appearance should the State appeal. Pending applications were disposed of. The appeal was reserved on 30 July 2026 and pronounced on 29 October 2026.