Antony Raju, a former state transport minister and Kerala MLA, was charged with tampering with evidence in a 1990 drug case, and the Supreme Court on Wednesday reopened the criminal case against him.
The accused, an Australian national, had been represented by Raju, who at the time was a practising lawyer. A bench consisting of Justices C T Ravikumar and Sanjay Karol ordered that the trial be finished within a year because it concerns a case that is more than 20 years old.
Raju is an MLA from the Janadhipathya Kerala Congress, which is a member of the Left Democratic Front coalition that rules the state.
When drugs were found in an Australian citizen's underwear in 1990, police detained him under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. The trial court found the accused guilty, but the Kerala High Court freed him since the innerwear was not of his size.. HC, however, believed that it might be possible to tamper with the evidence. Following a vigilance investigation, Raju and a court employee were charged with conspiracy to cause evidence disappearance and arraigned as accused in a First Information Report (FIR) filed in 1994. Raju challenged this in front of the HC, which dismissed the FIR on the grounds that a police chargesheet in a matter involving the fabrication of evidence in a judicial process cannot be taken into consideration.