48-year-old defendant wants to withdraw confession after three years

Mumbai: A man arrested three years ago in connection with the Antilia bomb scare and Mansukh Hiran murder case has written to the trial court saying he wants to withdraw his confession.

Manish Soni, 48, was accused of driving the car in which Hiran was allegedly murdered. He was arrested on June 17, 2021. In his alleged confession to the National Investigation Agency, Soni described the sequence of events leading to the murder and the roles of co-accused Santosh Shelar, Satish Mothkuri and Anand Jadhav.

He has now written a letter to the court from Yerawada Central Jail in which he “withdraws or annuls his confession”. The letter, written on September 25, reached the court on Wednesday. The court has now asked the public prosecutor to respond to his plea by October 25th.

Meanwhile, Jadhav has applied for bail. “The prosecution’s entire case is based on circumstantial evidence; There is no information that could link the defendant to the present case. There is only one witness who speaks about the alleged car and about one Anand. Whether the accused is the same Anand or not is not confirmed as no test identification parade was conducted in the present case through which the identity of the accused would have been confirmed,” the plea said.

Jadhav also raised an issue regarding the accused’s disclosure statements to the police. “All disclosure statements are inadmissible in two respects. Firstly, there is no discovery of the locations as the NIA already knew the locations before recording the disclosure statement. Second, all of the defendants who made a disclosure statement said the same thing, so it is not known who made the disclosure first.”

Jadhav has also raised questions on the application of the provisions of the UAPA to the case.