The Supreme Court has acquitted a father and son for a murder for which they were sentenced to life imprisonment 25 years ago, with the son having died in 2021 during the pendency of their appeal.

A bench of Justices V. Ramasubramanian and Pankaj Mithal noted that the FIR had been ante-dated by police to implicate Mohd Muslim and his son Shamshad.

The time and date of murder in the FIR were mentioned as 9 am on August 4, 1995, although the murder took place at 1.50 pm. The police appeared to have brought forward the time to lend credence to their version that Altaf Hussain was murdered on his way to court over a land dispute with the accused. It would be unlikely for a person to set out to attend a court session around 1.50 pm, or the post-lunch session, the Supreme Court noted.

The accused father-son moved the apex court in 2011 after the high court upheld the conviction and sentencing by the trial court. Shamshad died on August 16, 2021, and the case stood abated against him through an order passed by the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court said on Thursday: “The FIR… dated 04.08.1995 is stated to have been lodged at 9am. The submission of the accused appellant is that, in fact, the FIR was lodged at 1.50 pm and it has been ante-timed. We have perused the original of the FIR dated 04.08.1995 from the trial court record.

“A bare pursual of the aforesaid FIR clearly shows that there is some interpolation in the time of its lodging mentioned therein. It is evident from naked eye that ‘1’ has been converted into ‘9’ and ‘5’ has been rounded off to make ‘0’ whereas ‘PM’ has been converted into ‘AM’.”