9 accused of graft get bail

AKOLA: The police machinery got a severe setback when the chief judicial magistrate VA Lokhande granted permanent bail to all nine accused, including engineers and contractors or Akola Zilla Parishad, regarding graft charges in construction of Kolhapuri weirs.
The police teams from Balapur, Ural and Channi, who had come to arrest the accused, had to return empty-handed after the verdict.The nine accused, Vasant Kulkarni, Sanjay Chavan, Ravindra Mavande, Rajaram Lohkare, Anant Tayde, Narendra Pathak, Suresh Wankhade, Dharamsing Thakur and Sahebrao Hiwrale, were booked under relevant sections of the IPC.
These accused had surrendered in the court of the CJM earlier, who had granted them temporary bail. The defence lawyers claimed that the accused had not committed any crime. The public prosecutor later said that the state would file a criminal revision petition in the superior court since the CJM did not have powers to grant bail to the accused.