MUMBAI, May 18 -- Nearly 38 years after a Mumbai gangster was hacked to death in Andheri, a sessions court has acquitted an accused who had remained absconding for decades, holding that the prosecution failed to conclusively establish his identity as one of the assailants and that the evidence on record was insufficient to sustain a conviction. Additional sessions judge Satyanarayan R Navander acquitted Shamkumar Ramchandra Sharma in the 1988 murder case of Vilas Bhosale. Sharma had earlier been declared a proclaimed offender after allegedly absconding during the pendency of the trial. The court record indicates that Sharma was never secured for trial thereafter and the proceedings against him eventually continued in absentia under provisions of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita after the court found there was "no immediate prospect of arrest". A legal aid advocate was appointed to represent him. The judgement, however, does not indicate that Sharma was arrested later in connection with the case. According to the prosecution, Bhosale was attacked near Kamgar Kalyan Kendra in Andheri East on June 9, 1988, by seven to eight armed men carrying "swords, choppers and guptis (swordstick)". The prosecution claimed that Bhosale had stepped out of his house to look for a workman to repair the ceiling before the monsoon when the assailants allegedly chased him through the locality. He was later found lying in a pool of blood and was declared dead before admission at Cooper Hospital. The court noted that co-accused Khema Pooran Singh, Gulab Pooran Singh and Sanjay Sakharam Nirmal had already been acquitted in 2003 after trial, while another accused had since died. In a strongly worded judgement, the court said the prosecution had failed to produce any direct eyewitness linking Sharma to the murder and that its case rested largely on the testimony of a police constable who claimed to have seen a group of men chasing Bhosale shortly before the attack. "The foremost burden upon the prosecution was to establish beyond reasonable doubt the identity of the accused as the perpetrators of the crime," the court observed, adding that "suspicion, however grave, cannot take the place of legal proof." The court also found serious gaps in the identification evidence relied upon by the prosecution. While the prosecution claimed that a test identification parade had been conducted, the officer who conducted the exercise was never examined during trial. "In absence of examination of the officer who conducted the Test Identification Parade, the prosecution has failed to prove the manner in which the parade was conducted and whether all necessary safeguards ensuring fairness of the identification process were observed," the court said. "The evidentiary value of such identification therefore becomes seriously doubtful," the judge added. The court further questioned the reliability of the witness identification after such a long passage of time, noting that the incident had unfolded suddenly at night and involved seven to eight persons. "The possibility of mistaken identity, therefore, cannot be ruled out," the court observed, while pointing to the "considerable lapse of time" between the incident and the trial proceedings against Sharma. Summing up the prosecution's failures, the court said, "There is no eyewitness account, no proved recovery of weapons, no proved seizure of incriminating articles, no reliable Test Identification Parade and no other independent corroborative evidence."...