The Rajasthan High Court on Monday acquitted Bollywood actor Salman Khan in the 18-year-old blackbuck and chinkara poaching cases.
According to NDTV, Salman, who was accused, along with seven others – of killing a blackbuck and chinkara (endangered gazelle), had earlier appealed to the High Court challenging the lower court’s verdict for handing him one and five years’ imprisonment in the two separate cases of poaching.
Salman had appealed before the Jodhpur bench of the high court challenging a lower court in the two separate cases of poaching.
The hearing was completed in the last week of May and the order reserved by the high court.
“He has been acquitted in both the cases by the high court,” Salman’s counsel Hastimal Saraswat said.
One of the animals was killed at Bhawad on the outskirts of Jodhpur on September 26, 1998, and the other at Ghoda Farms on September 28, 1998, during the time they were shooting his film Hum Sath Sath Hain.
In 2007 Salman had served jail time of one week for the 1998 poaching case.
This is not the first time the actor has landed himself in trouble.
His recent rape comment during the promotions of his film Sultan rubbed India’s National Commission for Women (NCW) the wrong way. He was since ordered by the NCW to apologise for his insensitive comment, which has landed on deaf ears.
In May 2015, Khan was charged by the Mumbai High Court with culpable homicide and handed a five-year sentence for crashing his SUV into a group of homeless men in India’s entertainment capital Mumbai in 2002 and then fleeing the scene.
However, earlier this year, Salman was acquitted by the Bombay High Court (BHC) of all charges in a 2002 hit-and-run case as the ‘prosecution failed to establish its case against the star’.
