INDIA. MAN SENTENCED TO DEATH FREED AFTER RETRIAL

it was reported that thirty-five-year-old Mohammed Najir Mohiddin, a resident of Kalyan, India, sentenced to death for murdering his three children, was freed after being retried. The report said Mohiddin was recently acquitted by the same court that first convicted him, after the Bombay High Court refused to award capital punishment and directed retrial and re-examination of witnesses in the case.
Mohiddin was convicted in March 2002 by the Kalyan sessions court. However, in June the same court acquitted him after examination of witnesses failed to establish his role beyond doubt. The prosecution’s case was that on March 1, 2001, Mohiddin strangulated his three children, aged three, five and eight, in his house and then kept their bodies near the railway tracks to make it look like an accident. The bodies, wrapped in a bed sheet, were discovered by a constable from the Dombivli railway police station.