ibn sultan
A special court in Mumbai acquitted all seven accused in the case, including former BJP MP Pragya Thakur and Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Thursday, nearly 17 years after a powerful bomb blast in Maharashtra’s Malegaon killed six people and injured more than a hundred.
Pragya Singh Thakur and Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, Major (retired) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sameer Kulkarni, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, and Sudhakar Dhardwivedi were cleared of all charges, including criminal conspiracy and murder under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections of the anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Special Judge A K Lahoti, who pronounced all seven not guilty, noted, “Terrorism has no religion. Because no religion can advocate violence”.
Special Judge Lahoti said the prosecution failed to provide cogent and reliable evidence, and also failed to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The special judge said there might be strong suspicion against the accused, but it is not enough to punish them, said the court.
Special Judge Lahoti also said the prosecution proved the blast, but failed to establish that a bomb was fitted in the motorcycle. “Conspiracy and meetings also have not been proved. A grave degree of suspicion is established, but not enough to convict them; hence, the court has given them the benefit of the doubt. The interception of calls was not authorised. Both sanction orders to invoke are defective, and the UAPA cannot be invoked,” the court said.
The court also ordered compensation of Rs 2 lakh to the families of the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast victims, and Rs 50,000 to the injured victims to be given by the government.
The detailed order of the court is yet to be made available.
On September 29, 2008, a bomb went off at a chowk in Malegaon, a town known for its power loom industry, about 100 km northeast of Nashik in Maharashtra. The blast, which took place in an area with a sizeable Muslim population, killed six people and injured 100 during Ramzan, the holy month of fasting in Islam.
From Maharashtra ATS to NIA
The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which took over the investigation from the local police, suspected that an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) had been planted on an LML Freedom motorcycle.
ATS suspected that the conspirators had consciously chosen the month of Ramzan and the eve of Navaratri to carry out the bombing, to cause communal rifts and endanger the internal security of the state.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over the probe in 2011 and filed a chargesheet in 2016, claiming there were shortcomings in the ATS probe. The Central agency recommended that the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) be dropped from the Malegaon bomb blast case, rendering the confessions taken by the ATS inadmissible as evidence.
In the chargesheet, NIA also said that due to the passage of time — between 2008 and 2011, when they took over the probe — it was unable to make any recoveries from the spot for forensic examination. Its probe primarily focused on the ATS investigation, first pointing towards the ‘lacunae’ and also in the re-recording of statements of witnesses.
NIA had re-recorded some statements, where the witnesses said that the ATS statements were not proper.
Hostile witnesses
During the trial, more than 300 witnesses were examined, of whom around 40 turned hostile, some of whom also claimed that ATS threatened them into giving statements.
The accused also questioned the ATS probe and, subsequently, the NIA chargesheet, claiming that there was no evidence against them. They said that the conspiracy meetings, as claimed by ATS, were not proved, as none of the witnesses whom ATS claimed had participated or heard the accused speak of taking revenge or executing the plan had supported the prosecution’s case.
Special public prosecutors Avinash Rasal and Anushree Rasal submitted that the prosecution had relied on witness statements and technical evidence, such as Call Data Records and voice samples, to prove its case.
“We examined 323 witnesses and technical evidence to record the circumstances of the case. The delay in the trial proved to be a challenge as some witnesses turned hostile and over 30 passed away before the trial commenced,” SPP Rasal said at the end of the trial in April, when the court reserved the order.
