Pune: The Mumbai bench of the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) has set aside a couple of orders of July 25 and 26, 2023, in a general court-martial proceeding that sentenced an Army subedar in Pune to four years' rigorous jail and dismissed him from service in an alleged bribery case . "It would be appropriate to make a remark that the plausibility of the accused demanding money from the complainant, though, could not be ruled out. However, to prove demand and acceptance, the prosecution should prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt," the bench said, citing "too many gaps" in the prosecution's case against the subedar.
The gaps impede the prosecution story from being proven to the hilt, the bench noted. The tribunal discussed in detail the evidence and witness deposition on record and noted that there was no audio recording of the demand nor any video of the appellant (subedar) accepting money. No phenolphthalein powder treatment was done on the currencies purportedly handed over to the subedar to establish that he was caught ‘red-handed'.
Similarly, there was no separate list of currency notes before and after the trap, and the recovery memo was done the next day. Finally, the prosecution could not prove that the bag containing the money seized from the office room during the trap belonged to the subedar. The Military Intelligence (MI) had arrested the subedar in Jan 2022 from his office at the Commander Works Engineer (CWE), Air Force, Lohegaon, after an ex-serviceman had lo.