Decision on Salman's bail plea reserved till tomorrow

Jodhpur: A sessions court today reserved its decision on Bollywood superstar Salman Khan’s bail plea till tomorrow, his defence counsel said.

The actor, who was yesterday convicted by the trial court and sentenced to five years in prison in a 1998 blackbuck poaching case, would now be spending another night in Jodhpur Central Jail.

The district and sessions court here heard arguments on the suspension of sentence and bail application before deferring the matter till tomorrow.

In his arguments, defence counsel Mahesh Bora said there were various loopholes in the investigation. He argued that no investigation in any of the cases of poaching proved that Salman used firearms.

“We have argued that the eyewitness in the case was not reliable,” Bora said. The magistrate Ravindra Kumar Joshi also sought the record of the case from the lower court.

The actor is alleged to have shot and killed blackbucks in Kankani village near Jodhpur on the night of October 1, 1998 during the shooting of the film “Hum Saath Saath Hain”.

While convicting Salman, the trial court acquitted his Bollywood colleagues Saif Ali Khan, Tabu, Neelam and Sonali Bendre and a local, Dushyant Singh, giving them the “benefit of doubt” for the incident in October 1998.