Charging that evidence had been “fabricated” against Salman Khan in the 2002 hit-and-run case, his lawyer Shrikant Shivade on Wednesday picked holes in the evidence adduced by the Prosecution against the actor and said that the State had failed to make out a case of drunken driving against his client.
Continuing his final arguments in the ongoing re-trial of 49-year-old in the much-discussed hit-and-run case for the second day, Shivade rooted for punishment against the actor for ‘fabrication of documents’. He urged Additional Sessions Judge DW Deshpande to nail the “fabricated evidence” produced by the Prosecution in the case.
“If anything, your judgement should be an eye-opener for the police and medical officials on a case of this kind should not be investigated,” the defence lawyer said, as he alleged that the doctors had conducted themselves like mere pawns in the hands of the police investigating the case.
Drawing the court’s attention to the lop-sided manner in which the police investigated the case, Shivade told the court: “When they registered an FIR, the Bandra police did not make out any case of drunken driving against my client. In the FIR registered on September 28, 2002, there was no reference to any section related to drunken driving. This entire story of drunken driving was made up only on October 1, 2002”.
Asking the court to reject the eyewitness accounts of a victim who was run over by the car and could not see anything that was happening outside, Shivade alluded to the testimony of the victim concerned who had told the court that the actor was so inebriated that he fell down twice after getting out of the car and fleeing from the mishap site.
“How can the evidence of the witness concerned be believedIJ. He was beneath the car. How could see as to what was happening at the mishap. There is also another contradiction in his statement. On one hand he says the actor was dead drunk and could not stand on his case, while on the other the witness says that my client ran away from the scene. How did a man who could not even stand could have run away,”Shivade asked.