Former Bihar MLA Rajan Tiwary (in white shirt) comes out of the court in Dhanbad on Monday. (Gautam Dey)

Dhanbad, March 7: A fast track court today acquitted former Bihar MLA Rajan Tiwari in the infamous Ashok Jalan abduction case.

Tiwari, who is an accused in almost a dozen other cases in Bihar, including murder, was sent back to Beur Jail after the verdict was announced.

The judgment went in Tiwari’s favour after investigating officer Ramakant Prasad failed to establish the charges against Tiwari, and he was acquitted due to lack of evidence.

Jalan, a leading industrialist of the state and managing director of Dhanbad-based Hindustan Malleable Company, was kidnapped on the morning of December 14, 2000, from Bhuli Hirak Road in the coal capital by unidentified armed men while he was on his way to his factory from home.

His abductors, who were in an SUV, overtook Jalan’s car, forced him to disembark and took him to an undisclosed location at gunpoint. A massive combing operation, which was launched immediately, failed to locate the businessman. Jalan, however, returned home on January 9 2001, and claimed that his kidnappers had released him near Tundi from where he returned by bus. He failed to identify any of the accused and later moved to Mumbai for good with his family.

Tiwari was not initially named an accused in the FIR lodged by the police in the abduction case. Instead, his name figured in the supplementary chargesheet filed by the police on the basis of the statement of another co-accused, Himanshu Rai, who confessed that his brother Pankaj Kumar knew the then Gobindganj MLA Tiwari well.

During the hearing, which had been going on for the last 15 days and for which Tiwari had been brought to the coal capital and lodged in the district jail, the investigating officer failed to prove the connection between Tiwari and the other five co-accused. The five others were acquitted earlier.

The supplementary chargesheet named Tiwari as an accused on the premise that several phone calls from a Dhanbad mobile number were made to Tiwari’s landline in Patna immediately after the incident. Investigations, however, could not establish who owned the SIM card through which the calls were made.

The prosecution examined 12 witnesses in the case.

The acquittal will, however, bring no relief to the former MLA as he is already serving a life sentence in the Brij Bihari murder case.