New Delhi, March 31: A Delhi court today acquitted all five accused in the 1999 murder of Outlook cartoonist Irfan Hussain saying the prosecution had failed to substantiate its charges in a case built on circumstantial evidence.

“In a case of circumstantial evidence, each and every circumstance should be proved independently and the chain of circumstances should be complete and the compound effect of the chain should be framed in such a manner that it is only the accused persons who had committed the offence and none else,” additional sessions judge Talwant Singh said.

The ruling comes a month after Delhi police filed an appeal against the acquittals in the Jessica Lal case on the grounds that circumstantial evidence was ignored.

Mustafa Ansari, Sanjay Kumar, Heera Singh alias Bullet, Mohammed Jasim and Mohammed Shahid ?? part of a gang of carjackers ? were acquitted of the charges of kidnapping and killing the cartoonist. The police have held that the murder was the result of a carjacking that went wrong.

Irfan went missing on the night of March 8, 1999, while returning from work to his Sahibabad residence. His wife, Dr Muneera Hussain, lodged a missing persons report at Sarojini Nagar police station the next day.

According to the prosecution, he was kidnapped and killed by the five near the Gazipur traffic lights in Delhi.

The cartoonist’s decomposed and mutilated body was found on March 13 in a bush near Mayur Vihar in east Delhi close to the national highway. Irfan had been stabbed 28 times, strangled and his throat had been slashed. His car, mobile phone and jewellery were missing.

The police said they had recovered his bag containing a mobile charger, a pen and a diary from the house of one of the accused, Sanjay, in judicial custody in another auto-snatching case. The prosecution said the recoveries were made in the presence of a public witness, Banwarilal. But Banwarilal denied this in court and said the police had obtained his signature on a plain paper.

Irfan’s white Maruti was allegedly recovered on December 8, 1999, from a place 50 to 60 yards from a checkpost near Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir when the driver, asked to stop for a security check, fled after abandoning the vehicle.

The judge dismissed this as “improbable”. “This was a highly improbable circumstance that the driver has already passed the checkpost and driven up to 50-60 yards beyond it and that instead of escaping in the vehicle itself, he abandoned it and ran on foot,” he said.

Irfan’s wife alleged that there were inconsistencies in the case. An anonymous caller had claimed responsibility for killing her husband days before his body was found, she said. Crank calls to the Hussain household started just after he disappeared and ended abruptly an hour after his body was found but before police had released the news.