2008 Malegaon blast: Victims' kin move Bombay HC to quash acquittal of Pragya, 6 others

Mumbai, Sep 9 (IANS) Calling the acquittal in the 2008 Malegaon blast case as “wrong and bad in law”, six family members of the explosion’s victims have appealed to the Bombay High Court to reverse the Special NIA court's decision to set free all the seven accused, a lawyer said on Tuesday.

Seeking proceedings against former MP Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and others, the appeal, filed by Nisar Ahmed Sayyed Bilal and five others through advocate Mateen Shaikh on Monday, sought the quashing of the July 31 judgment of Special NIA Judge A.K. Lahoti.

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, including 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 comes 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.

An NIA spokesperson said last month that the probe agency was still going through the judgment and had yet to take a call on filing an appeal against the verdict.

Another official of the probe agency claimed that, currently, legal opinion is being taken at the branch-level and subsequently a decision will be taken on the future course of action.

He explained that whenever a court order is delivered in a case, it goes to the CIO (Chief Investigating Officer) and then a legal opinion is taken to decide whether to file an appeal or not.

He also hinted that, 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.

--IANS

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