Mumbai: 17 years after the 2008 Malegaon blast, the trial in the case finally comes to end and the special judge has reserved the case for judgement on Saturday against seven accused including BJP leader Pragya Singh Thakur and Lt Col Prasad Purohit.
The prosecution on Saturday filed its final written arguments, with some citation marking the end of hearing in the case, after which special judge AK Lahoti adjourned the case to May 8 for judgement.
On September 29, 2008, a bomb planted in a motorcycle went off in Malegaon, killing six persons and injuring 101. The Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad had later arrested 11 persons for their alleged roles in the blasts. In January 2009, the ATS filed a charge sheet against all the accused under MCOCA.
The ATS had claimed that the accused were members of Abhinav Bharat, aiming to establish a Hindu Rashtra called Aryavart and train people in guerrilla warfare. They allegedly trained youths in arms and explosives at Bhonsala Military School in 2001, some of whom were linked to the 2006 and 2008 Malegaon blasts.
In 2011, all related terror cases were handed over to the NIA. On May 13, 2016, the NIA filed a supplementary chargesheet, endorsing the ATS theory but giving a clean chit to Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and others. It recommended dropping charges, citing a flawed ATS probe and stated that MCOCA provisions didn’t apply.
Apart from Thakur, the NIA exonerated three accused – Shyam Sahu, Praveen Takalki and Shivnarayan Kalsangra – saying it found no evidence against them. The court however, refused to discharge Thakur, claiming that the evidence collected by ATS cannot be discarded at this stage.
Even after filing of the chargesheet in 2016, the charges were framed only in October 2018 against seven accused. Apart from Thakur and Puroht, Major (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, Sameer Kulkarni, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, Sudhakar Dwivedi alias Swami Amritunand Devtirth under various provisions under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for conspiracy, murder and other relevant charges. The trial, however, began only in November 2018. The trial, which has lasted for over 8 years, was finally concluded in July last year.
