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Man Acquitted By Calcutta High Court Two Years After He Died Serving A Life Term

He was accused of murder.
Calcutta High Court.
Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Calcutta High Court.

On 6 August, the Calcutta High Court acquitted Bimalendu Mondal of charges of murdering his wife. Mondal had appealed against a lower court order convicting him for murder in 2004 and had been serving a life term since then. The case was finally listed to be heard in 2017 and on Monday the high court rejected the lower court's order pointing out that Mondal had been convicted on flimsy grounds. Only, Mondal died two years ago while serving the life term.

According on Bengali tabloid Ei Samay, Bimalendu's wife was found dead in a lake next to the couple's house in 2002. The forensic reports found she had been poisoned and the deceased's brother told the police that the day the woman was found dead, he had been to their house and sensed tension between the couple. The couple lived in Bankura district of West Bengal.

Ei Samay reports that Mondal, who didn't have enough money to hire a lawyer, requested a lawyer to file his petition in the high court for free. When the case was finally listed in 2017, the division bench found several inadequacies in how the court officials recorded the case. Since no family member had turned up, the bench asked a young advocate called Apalak Basu to take up the case on Mondal's behalf.

After Basu won the case, the hunt for Mondal began. The superintendent of Alipore Central Jail in Kolkata then dug up documents to find Mondal had been admitted to hospital on December 2016 with an undisclosed illness and had died on the 28th of the month.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.