Salman Khan sentenced to five years in jail: The witnesses that mattered

When a sessions court found Salman Khan guilty of a range of charges including culpable homicide and other offences, the court would have relied on a lot of evidence and witness statements to convict him. Here are the most crucial witness testimonies that might have influenced the verdict against the actor. The eyewitnesses who stood by their statements on Salman Khan [caption id=“attachment_2232176” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Khan was sentenced to five years in jail. Solaris images[/caption] Mannu Khan, Mohammed Kalim Iqbal Pathan and Muslim Shaikh were employees of the American Express who testified that they had seen the actor on the night of the incident. Mannu Khan told the court that he had seen the actor emerge from the driver’s seat following the incident and that the actor was so drunk that he fell out of the car after the incident. While Muslim Shaikh confirmed the actor was driving the car, Pathan confirmed that Khan which side of the vehicle he got out from but didn’t confirm whether he was behind the wheel. Ramsare Pande, the owner of a dairy near the American Express bakery, also said that he saw the actor emerge from the vehicle after the incident. The police bodyguard who was with Khan at the time Ravindra Patil didn’t live to see the verdict and though he was deemed hostile by the prosecution had given a statement in which he had said the actor had gone to the JW Marriott with singer Kamaal Khan on the night of the accident. Patil said that Khan was drunk when he was driving and he had warned the actor that he was speeding just before the accident took place. Patil died of tuberculosis in 2007. The defence lawyer had called Patil a liar and said that he had been sleeping at the time of the incident. The witnesses who proved Salman Khan was drunk while driving While Salman Khan’s defence was that he wasn’t drunk at the wheel when his car crashed into the American Express Bakery. However, the prosecution produced a witness, Dattaray Khobrajirao Bhalshankar from the forensic science laboratory, who corroborated the fact that the actor’s blood sample was found to contain 62 mg of alcohol while the highest amount found in a person would be no more than 40-45 mg and that would be only if they were taking medication. Shankar’s testimony may have proved to be enough to prove that the actor was driving while drunk despite the fact there were other witnesses who claimed otherwise. While one witness claimed the actor didn’t smell of alcohol after the accident, Molay Baug, the employee of a bar where the actor was seen prior to the incident, said that while he had served alcohol to the actor’s table he wasn’t sure if Khan had consumed it. The repentant driver who turned up as a witness 13 years later to confess Legal experts quoted by the Times of India say that the arrival of the defence witness who claimed after 13 years was a bad move. Lawyer Nitin Pradhan was quoted in the report as saying that to prove his claim that he wasn’t behind the wheel of his SUV in 2002, the actor should have deposed, placed himself for cross examination and then let the driver depose as a defence witness. Singh had claimed that he was the driver of the car on the night of the accident and the actor had exited from the driver’s seat only because his door was jammed. “From day one of the accident, I have been saying that I was driving the vehicle and not Salman Khan. But nobody listened, and I was not aware what I should do further,” Singh told the court. However, the prosecution pointed out that none of the witnesses had corroborated this claim and no one remembered seeing Singh on the spot. The actor’s claim that he wasn’t behind the wheel backfired with the court saying that it had found no evidence to suggest that the actor wasn’t behind the wheel at the time of the accident.