Prabhu Shankar Agarwal in Alipore Central jail. A Telegraph picture

The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to bhujia baron Prabhu Shankar Agarwal, who has been sent to jail for life for trying to get a Burrabazar tea-stall owner killed in in 2005.

The bench of justices B. Sudershan Reddy and Surinder Singh Nijjar granted bail to the Haldiram’s owner following a brief submission by his lawyers.

Prabhu Shankar’s brother Mahesh, who was in court, expressed a sigh of relief, saying his brother had been “falsely implicated in the case”.

R.F. Nariman led the defence team while Altaf Ahmed and Tara Chand Sharma represented the Bengal government.

Agarwal, 53, has been in jail since a trial court in Calcutta awarded him life imprisonment on January 30. Four others — alleged gangster Gopal Tiwari and his henchmen Arun Khandelwal, Manoj Sharma and Raju Sonkar — were also given life terms.

The trial court had found Agarwal and the others guilty of hatching a plot to kill Satyanarayan Thakur, who had been rejecting Agarwal’s proposal to shift his tea stall.

It was Thakur that Tiwari and his goons had come looking for but ended up shooting at his nephew Pramod Sharma, who was sleeping outside the shop.

“We have been resisting Prabhuji’s attempts to get us to vacate the place since 1996 and there have been many hurdles and setbacks. Prabhuji’s bail is one such setback. But we’ll keep fighting,” Pramod told Metro.

Agarwal’s appeal against his conviction and sentence is pending with Calcutta High Court, which had denied him bail on July 2.

Agarwal’s petition against the high court order stated that the plot on which the tea stall stood had been in his legal possession since 1996 and there was no reason for him to use force to evict the complainant or commit any offence.

His lawyers claimed that Agarwal could not be charged under IPC Section 307 (attempt to murder) as he was neither present on the scene of the crime nor directly involved in it.

The apex court, however, refused to go into the merits of the case.