Mumbai, April 28 -- A court in Sindhudurg has convicted Maharashtra Minister Nitesh Rane in the 2019 mud attack case involving an engineer of the National Highways Authority of India, sentencing him to one month in jail, with the sentence suspended to allow him to appeal.

The ruling brings renewed focus on the widely reported incident, where visuals had shown Rane and his supporters throwing mud at a public official during protests over the condition of the Mumbai-Goa highway.

The court held that public grievances cannot justify humiliating a government officer and stressed that elected representatives cannot take the law into their own hands.

The incident occurred in July 2019 when Rane called NHAI Sub-Divisional Engineer Prakash Shed...