MUMBAI: The Bombay high court has held in the infamous Amboli double murder case that while Jitendra Rana was guilty of murdering Keenan Santos, the prosecution had failed to prove that two other accused, Sunil Both and Deepak Piwal, shared common intention to kill.The court therefore acquitted them of murder but upheld their sentences for other offences.A bench of Justices Makarand Karnik and Sandesh Patil upheld Rana’s murder conviction but reduced his sentence to 20 years’ RI without statutory remission.It noted that he was 25 at the time of the incident and was not a habitual offender. The fourth convict, Satish Dulgaj, died in November 2025 while his appeal was pending. All four had been in custody since 2011.In its 184-page judgment, the bench said witnesses’ accounts of Both and Piwal’s alleged roles in assaulting Keenan and his friend Reuben Fernandez were inconsistent.“It would be too unsafe to hold” that the two had assaulted them, the judges said, adding that the prosecution had failed to establish common intention. But they concluded that Both and Piwal had assaulted Avinash and Benjamin.“The prosecution, however, has proved that the deceased Keenan was assaulted by the accused Rana in the most gruesome manner,” the bench said.
Victim’s dad got death threats from accused
Keenan, Reuben, Benjamin, complainant Avinash and their three women friends had gone to a restaurant in Amboli, Andheri (W), to watch a cricket match. After leaving around 10.30pm, the men went to a nearby paan shop while the women headed to the washroom.On their return, they encountered the four accused. Rana and Dulgaj allegedly molested one of the women and passed obscene remarks. When Keenan objected, an altercation followed, during which Avinash slapped Rana.The accused threatened the group before returning with knives, a cricket stump and a wooden stick. Rana and Dulgaj stabbed Keenan and Reuben, respectively, while Both and Piwal assaulted Avinash and Benjamin.Special judge SV Joshi had earlier held that the killings were premeditated and that all four accused shared a common intention to murder.She rejected the defence argument that the deaths occurred in a fit of rage and amounted to culpable homicide not amounting to murder.The high court judges agreed, observing that “this is not a case where death was caused due to grave and sudden provocation but was pre-planned to commit murder”.The court also held that Rana and Dulgaj had molested a woman. It further ruled that the non-production of CCTV footage was not fatal to the prosecution’s case and that the eyewitnesses’ testimonies could not be discarded.
