Chandigarh, Sept. 21 -- A Jalandhar man, accused of entering Chandigarh on a bus with a pistol without a permit, has been acquitted by the Punjab and Haryana high court.

"The petitioner was asleep during the journey, so it is not reasonable to infer that he wilfully committed an offence by carrying the weapon in an unauthorised area without requisite permission," observed the bench of justice Sanjay Vashishth while overturning the three-year jail term awarded by the trial court in 2022 and acquitting the petitioner, Amritpal Singh.

As per prosecution, on November 11, 2016, police received a wireless message that a man was carrying a weapon on a CTU bus. When the bus was stopped on the Chandigarh-Punjab border, the man was apprehended an...