New Delhi, April 24: Delay in lodging an FIR cannot be a ground for disbelieving the prosecution’s version, the Supreme Court has ruled, upholding the life imprisonment of five men convicted of murdering five persons in Rajasthan’s Digod district.

Man’s basic instinct, the apex court said, is survival and all other actions come later.

“The ghastly and gruesome crime must have sent a shiver in the spine and shattered the brains and bones of the witnesses to the crime and shock, panic and inequilibrium would have reigned simultaneously to leave them totally confounded.

“No one could have dared to move an inch towards the police station, for man’s basic instinct prompts him to survive first and then think about any other action,” a two-judge bench of Justices K.S. Radhakrishnan and Dipak Misra said in a recent judgment.

The court dismissed the appeal filed by the five convicts challenging the life term imposed on them by Rajasthan High Court while commuting their death penalty.

On the intervening night of June 28 and 29, 2001, five persons — Purushottam, Ram Kumar Dhaka, Kalu Lal Mali, Lokendra Sharma and Heera Lal Meghwal — were hacked to death by a group of people armed with swords, knives, rods and stones.

A Digod sessions court convicted 17 persons in 2002 for the murders. Of them six — Yuvraj, Hemraj, Hansraj, Radhey Shyam, Modu Nath and Mohan — were given death sentence. The rest were sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment.

On June 2, 2005, the high court commuted the death penalty of five of the convicts to life term and acquitted Mohan.

In the apex court, the five, while appealing against the high court order, argued that there was a delay in registering the FIR for over 15 hours, which left scope for a tutored complaint.

They also argued that the prosecution had only produced the relatives of the deceased and had failed to produce any independent witnesses.

Rejecting the arguments, the apex court said the brother of one of the deceased, Purushottam, had deposed that he and the others were too traumatised to proceed to the police station.

It was only after daylight broke on June 29, 2001, that they could muster the courage to file an FIR.

“A delayed FIR can usher in craftsmanship, manipulation and embellishment and may make the prosecution story vulnerable, but when the delay has been adequately explained, the same deserves acceptation and, accordingly, we do so,” Justice Misra, writing the judgment, said.