MUMBAI, March 28 -- A 51-year-old man is set to walk free after spending 12 years in prison on charges of kidnapping, rape and murder of a minor in 2013, as the Bombay high court (HC) recently found that the Thane police had stage-managed the investigation at the time. The court has acquitted the man - Shantilal Gaikwad -- who used to work as a labourer in Thane at the time and was given a lifer for the alleged offence. The toddler had gone missing after attending a neighbour's child's birthday party on August 20, 2013, following which her parents filed a missing complaint at Kasarwadavli police station. Gaikwad, who used to sleep at the Thane railway station, found the abandoned toddler on the same night, fed her and kept her with him a day. Her parents meanwhile filed a habeas corpus petition at the HC in 2014, after she remained untraceable for over six months. A division bench of justices A S Gadkari and Shyam Chandak observed on Wednesday, "...since the matter was taken to this court in the writ petition, stage was managed by the police pressuring the appellant (Gaikwad) to give the confessions." They also said that the police had taken the help of independent and panch witnesses "to show that the case was resolved". The judges said that witness testimonies and Gaikwad's purported confessions indicated that when he found the missing child, "he wanted to feed her." He made two attempts to inform police officers at Thane railway station about the abandoned child, but they "did not take him seriously". After that, the court noted, the child remained in Gaikwad's company throughout the next day. "Since the child was away from her parents and in the company of an unknown, therefore, it is safe to presume that she must have repeatedly cried during transit, if not constantly. However, the appellant did no wrong with her," the judges said. While two other men accused of kidnapping the girl for begging were acquitted by the special court for Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) in Thane, Gaikwad was convicted on July 9, 2024. He has been in jail since his arrest on July 29, 2014. Amit Gharte, appointed as a legal aid lawyer, argued his appeal against conviction before the HC. Gharte argued that after the parents filed a habeas corpus petition, HC had on July 18, 2014, observed that "proper investigation was not done in the case" and directed Ravindra Singhal, then additional commissioner of police, Thane, to look into the matter and submit a report on July 30, 2014. The judges said, "We have noticed that as soon as the parents of the child filed the writ petition, within 15 days, the investigation officers searched and arrested the appellant, but only on the basis of weak and inadmissible pieces of evidence in the form of photographs and the CCTV footage which was never produced in the trial." The prosecution stated that Gaikwad, who was in custody of the Kasarwadavli police station in another case, had confessed first before a police officer on July 29, 2014, and a month later, on August 21 and 22 before a magistrate that he had allegedly handed over the child to one Sheru Salat. A year after she went missing, while the police's search was underway on HC's direction, a child was found; the parents of the missing girl accepted her custody from the police on August 1, 2014. However, days later tests showed that the DNA of the child and the parents did not match. The child who was found was, in fact, the daughter of Salat, who was named as a fourth accused in the case. HC then asked the police to investigate further. The police alleged that on September 5, 2014, while still in custody, Gaikwad confessed to raping the child twice after smoking ganja with his friend. He allegedly killed her with a broken hockey stick when she didn't stop crying. The police claimed he raped the dead child and threw her body and the hockey stick into the Indrayani river. Gharte told the court that Gaikwad was wrongly arrested and Salat's daughter was shown as the victim by the police. He argued that Gaikwad was "falsely implicated in this case by the police to save their own skin". The division bench observed, "Considering the evidence as a whole, it appears that both the confessions were the result of the pressure exerted upon the appellant by the police as the police machinery could not stand on its own legs." The court also said that the police could have searched for more CCTV footage from the place of kidnapping, the birthday party venue. "Despite the investigation having been conducted by senior and experienced police officers from the outset, none of the said officers deemed it necessary to collect such footage or to take any steps in that direction."...