The Kerala High Court has suspended the life sentence of Mohammed Ali, a Middle Andaman resident, convicted in the 2005 abduction and murder of engineering student Shyamal Mandal.
Ali, listed as accused number two in the case, was handed life imprisonment by the CBI Court in Thiruvananthapuram in April 2022 under Sections 120B, 364A, 302 and 379 of the IPC for criminal conspiracy, abduction for ransom, and murder. Mandal, a B.Tech student from the Andamans, went missing from his hostel on October 13, 2005. His father later received ransom calls from Chennai demanding ₹20 lakh. On October 23, his body was recovered from an isolated part of the city.
The CBI trial court based its conviction on circumstantial evidence, pointing to Ali’s alleged use of fake SIM cards, links to ransom calls, and contact with an absconding co-accused. In August 2022, the High Court had initially suspended Ali’s sentence, but this relief was overturned by the Supreme Court in September 2024 following an appeal by Mandal’s father. The apex court asked the High Court to hear the matter afresh while considering the family’s objections.
After a fresh hearing, a division bench comprising Justices P.B. Suresh Kumar and Jobin Sebastian recently reinstated the suspension of Ali’s sentence and made his interim bail absolute. The court noted weaknesses in the trial court’s findings, particularly regarding claims that Ali had been spotted at a public phone booth and that he had transported the victim’s handset to Chennai. These assertions, the bench held, were unsupported by evidence.
By excluding those findings, the judges said the remaining circumstances, Ali’s alleged link to ransom calls and mobile handsets, did not form a complete chain of proof. They stressed that while suspicion against Ali remained strong, suspicion alone could not replace conclusive proof in a case built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
The order underlined a settled principle of criminal law: convictions based on circumstantial evidence must rest on a chain of facts so complete that no other conclusion except guilt is possible.
