Prabhu Shankar Agarwal being taken to court on Friday and (above) Pramod Sharma

The high court on Wednesday admitted an appeal by bhujia baron Prabhu Shankar Agarwal against a lower court order sentencing him to life imprisonment for hatching a criminal conspiracy and attempting to murder a trader.

The division bench of Justice D.P. Sengupta and Justice P.K. De also granted Agarwal, who owns the Haldiram’s Prabhuji chain of stores, leave to move a bail plea.

Moving the appeal, Agarwal’s lawyer Sekhar Basu submitted that Friday’s trial court verdict was “faulty” and “not in accordance with law”.

Police had accused the Haldiram’s owner and three others of hiring Gopal Tiwari, an extortionist, to kill Satyanarayan Thakur, a tea-stall owner who refused to vacate the ground floor of a building in Burrabazar’s Jagmohan Mullick Lane that Agarwal wanted to develop.

Accordingly, two cases were filed against Agarwal. “In one case, he was charged under IPC sections 307 IPC (attempt to murder) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) and in the other case, under IPC sections 307 and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention). But the charge under Section 34 was not finally framed against my client. If the ‘common intention’ motive did not hold against Agrawal, how could the judge conclude that he had tried to murder the tea-stall owner?” Basu submitted.

Public prosecutor Ashimesh Goswami, who vowed to “strongly oppose” the appeal as well as the bail plea, said: “The fact that Agarwal had hired Tiwari to kill Thakur could not be denied. On March 30, 2005, Tiwari and his accomplices had turned up in Jagmohan Mullick Lane and mistakenly fired at Thakur’s nephew Pramod Sharma.”

Apart from Agarwal, Tiwari, Arun Khandelwal, Manoj Sharma and Raju Sonkar were convicted in the case and awarded the same punishment as the Haldiram’s owner.