lucknow court proceedings into the awadhesh rai murder case had hit a roadblock when the case diary suddenly went missing in 2020 the matter went up to the high court which told the trial court to go ahead with the proceedings based on a certified photocopy of the case diary available in the court recordsthis apart it was prosecution witness number two vijay pandey an eyewitness to the murder who also helped with the convictiona senior officer of the prosecution said that mukhtar ansari had tried to take advantage of the missing case diary as his lawyer appealed that hearing should not be done on certified photostat copies of the case diarywe have been pursuing this case since 1991 even though all witnesses are ready to give evidence this case is lingering due to conspiracies of mukhtar he claimed that the original case diary has been missing since 2007 and this fact came to light during its hearing in 2022 he saidthe prosecution officer said that an appeal was made before the allahabad high court to ensure that his case be separated from the files of other accused after it on the hcs order the hearing in the case started in the district court when it was found that the original case diary is missing from the mpmla court of varanasi a certified photostat copy of the case diary was arranged to ensure that trial against mukhtar would go on smoothly in varanasi the prosecution officer added another factor that helped the prosecution was the rock solid testimony of the eyewitnessin his statement to the police and later in court vijay kumar pandey who owned a shop near the place of incident on august 3 1991 had said that four men carrying weapons alighted from a van and opened several rounds of fire on awadesh rai theassailants had fled and rai was taken in the same van to the hospital where doctors declared him dead said government counsel vinay singhsingh also said that pandey during cross examination proved very gritty and narrated the exact spot of the crime by forming a map and telling the location of the crime scene the distance between the van and the house of awadesh rai et cetera since the filing of the chargesheet by the police on august 3 1991 the day of incident to crossexamination in 2007 vijay pandey remained unmoved and stuck to his word