Mumbai: Seventeen years after a powerful bomb ripped through the communally-sensitive town of Malegaon, a Special Court of National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday acquitted all the seven accused in the case, including former BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur alias Swami Purnachetanand Giri, former Military Intelligence official Lt Col Prasad Purohit (Retd), and Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi alias Dayanand Pandey alias Swami Amrutanand Devtirth, a self-proclaimed Shankaracharya.
Special Judge A K Lahoti acquitted the accused for want of evidence.
The Navratri-eve blast coinciding with the month of Ramadhan just a couple days before Eid, on September 29, 2008, had claimed the lives of six persons and injured 101 others at Malegaon in Nashik district of Maharashtra.
The investigations were transferred from the Nashik Rural Police to the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Maharashtra Police and later to the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
There were a total 12 accused in the case of which five were discharged on 27 December 2017.
Besides Pragya Singh, Col Purohit and Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi, the four other accused who were acquitted are Maj Ramesh Upadhyaya (Retd), Sameer Kulkarni alias Chanakya Sameer, Ajay alias Raja Rahirkar, and Sudhakar Onkarnath Chaturvedi alias Chanakya Sudhakar.
“The prosecution has failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused conspired to executed the blast. There is no conclusive evidence linking them to the crime,” the court observed.
"Prosecution proved that a blast occurred in Malegaon but failed to prove that bomb was placed in that motorcycle," the judge noted, adding that the prosecution could not prove that the LML Freedom belonged to Pragya Singh and there is no evidence of storing or assembling the explosives at Col Purohit's residence.
The trial in the case was for offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the Indian Penal Code since the charges under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against the accused were dropped.
The court also directed the Maharashtra government to provide compensation— Rs 2 lakh each to the families of those killed and Rs 50,000 to those injured in the incident.
Meanwhile, Shahid Nadeem, who represented the victims and their families, said that they would move the Bombay High Court against the NIA Special Court verdict.
Rattled by the NIA Special Court verdict in the Malegaon case, lawyer-activist Nitin Satpute said he would file a PIL in the Bombay High Court, making the NIA a party.
“The investigating agency has kept deliberate lapses in investigations and deliberately not collected sufficient evidence and filed defective charge sheet so that to help, save, shield and protect accused in Malegaon bomb blast case,” he said.
“FIR must be filed against the police authority officer who has not investigated properly at the behest of someone to save all accused, resulting which all accused got acquitted by special court. I am going to file a PIL against this investigation agency,” he added.
The accused faced trial under sections 16 (committing terrorist act) and 18 (conspiring to commit terrorist act) of the UAPA and under IPC sections 120 (b) (criminal conspiracy), 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 324 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 153 (a) (promoting enmity between two religious groups).
Initially, the probe was conducted by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) led by Special Inspector General of Police Hemant Karkare, who was killed during the 26/11 terror attack. The ATS had filed the chargesheet in 2009 and thereafter a supplementary chargesheet. The case was later transferred to the NIA, which filed another supplementary chargesheet in 2016.
The trial in numbers:
323 prosecution witnesses and 8 defence witnesses were examined in the course.
10,800 exhibits were submitted.
404 articles were seized as part of the investigation.
The trial spanned five different Special Judges, with written submissions running over 1,300 pages.
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