Bail Relief For Sonam Raghuvanshi To Continue After Confusion In Supreme Court

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to stay the Meghalaya High Court's bail granted to Sonam Raghuvanshi, who is accused of murdering her husband, Raja Raghuvanshi, during their honeymoon last year.

The high court on June 29 had upheld a Shillong court's April order granting bail to Sonam, prompting the state government to challenge the order.

The Supreme Court expressed reservations over the high court order but refused to stay it, noting Sonam had already been released from jail. A bench of justices MM Sundresh and Sheel Nagu said it would first observe the progress of the trial. It also issued a notice to Sonam.

During the hearing, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Meghalaya government, also cited the Pune fort murder case, where a man, Ketan Agarwal, was allegedly killed by his fiancee, Siya Goyal, and her lover, Chetan Chaudhary.

He said the allegations against Sonam were serious in nature, and she cannot be released on technical grounds.

The Meghalaya Honeymoon Murder Case

Sonam Raghuvanshi was arrested in June last year in connection with the murder of her businessman husband, Raja Raghuvanshi.

Sonam and Raja, both from Madhya Pradesh's Indore, got married on May 11 last year and had gone on a honeymoon in Meghalaya's Sohra on May 20. The couple then went missing three days later, and 29-year-old Raja's body was found on June 2.

Sonam, 25, was arrested from Uttar Pradesh's Ghazipur on June 9. Her lover, Raj Singh Kushwaha, was also later arrested.

Sonam Raghuvanshi Got Bail After 10 Months

After spending about 10 months in judicial custody in Shillong District Jail, a trial court granted her bail on April 27. The court observed that the investigating agency failed to properly communicate the grounds of her arrest. It noted that all arrest-related documents, including the arrest memo, justification checklist, inspection memo and case diary extract, incorrectly mentioned Section 403(1) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita instead of Section 103(1), which deals with the offence of murder.

The court held that the repeated error could not be treated as a mere clerical mistake, as none of the documents informed her that she was being arrested for the offence of murder. It also observed that the specific facts constituting the alleged offence had also not been communicated to her at the time of arrest.

Sonam Raghuvanshi's Bail Challenged

The Meghalaya government then challenged the trial court's order in the high court, saying the error was purely typographical and had caused no prejudice to the accused.

The high court, however, dismissed the appeal, questioning why the same error appeared repeatedly across multiple official documents. A single bench of Justice W Diengdoh observed that portions of the arrest records appeared to have been copied from standard templates, including an irrelevant reference describing the accused as a deserter from the armed forces.

"It is evident that such preparation was made without any application of mind... and nowhere is found any specific allegation or information as to what are the actual charges against her," the bench had observed.

"If this is the manner in which the intimation of the grounds of arrest is made, the same reflects a total non-application of judicious mind on the part of the arresting agency," it said.

The Meghalaya government had then moved the Supreme Court. The hearing will continue on July 9.