Mumbai, Sep 16 Hearing a plea challenging the acquittal in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, the Bombay High Court on Tuesday expressed surprise over a victim’s father not becoming a witness during the trial and hinted that an “open gate” is not available to everyone for filing an appeal.
A bench headed by Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar put off the hearing to Wednesday, saying that it needs more information on who among the six appellants were witnesses in the trial.
“Give us details. This is not an open gate for everyone,” the court told the appellants’ lawyer.
During the hearing, when CJ Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad asked the lawyer for the appellants if they were witnesses in the trial, he said that the first appellant, Nisar Ahmed Sayyed Bilal, whose son was killed in the explosion, was not a witness in the trial.
The court responded by saying, “The father should have become a witness if his son was killed.”
Earlier, calling the acquittal in the 2008 Malegaon blast case “wrong and bad in law”, six family members of those killed in the explosion filed an appeal seeking a reversal of the Special NIA court's decision to set free all seven accused, including former BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur and Lt Col Prasad Purohit.
The appeal, filed by Nisar Ahmed Sayyed Bilal and five others through advocate Mateen Shaikh, sought the quashing of the July 31 judgment of Special NIA Judge A.K. Lahoti.
Earlier, dismissing the investigators’ theory of “Saffron or Hindu terror”, the Special NIA court had given the benefit of the doubt to the accused while acquitting all seven of them.
Those set free by the trial court included Pragya Thakur, Lt. Col. Shrikant Purohit, Major (Retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sameer Kulkarni.
The explosion killed six people on September 29, 2008, and injured 101 in Malegaon, a communally sensitive town in Maharashtra, when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle detonated near a mosque during the holy month of Ramzan.
Earlier, soon after her acquittal, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur claimed that she was tortured for refusing to spread false information during the investigation.
She slammed the investigative process, alleging custodial torture, coercion, and politically motivated targeting by senior police officials.
The appeal filed in the High Court against the acquittal came at a time when the NIA is believed to be studying the acquittal order to take a call on the need or timing of an appeal against the verdict. Normally, a decision on filing a review petition is to be taken in 30 days, but the time limit for filing an appeal can be extended up to 90 days.
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