How Mumbai police lost the plot on suburban rail blasts

Hindustan Times

5 days ago

The Mumbai suburban railway bombing, also known as the 7/11 blasts, took place on July 11, 2006. Unfortunately, it took place when we lacked an integrated approach to our intelligence coordination and terror crime investigation.
The then Mumbai police commissioner told a security advisory group constituted by the Maharashtra government — of which I was a member — that he had never been given any indication in his meetings with the Intelligence Bureau at the highest level before the attack that the Mumbai suburban railway system was a target. In fact, it seemed that the central intelligence indicated that religious places would be targeted.
The 7/11 attacks killed 189 passengers in different trains on the Western Railway in six minutes, compared to 26/11 attacks where the death toll during the 58-hour stand-off stood at 175. An American media report on July 21, 2006, said that the New York Police Department (NYPD) had sent an officer to Mumbai to study the 'simplicity and lethality' of 7/11 attacks, which 'were the equivalent of bombing seven commuter stations between Manhattan and Westchester'.
NYPD wanted to understand how the Mumbai suburban attacks were executed with such precision. Post the Twin Tower attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11), the March 11, 2004, attacks on the commuter railway system in Madrid, and the July 7 London tube bombings, the NYPD had augmented its security network. Therefore, the Mumbai bombings were of interest to it to see what gaps remained. The 7/11 attackers had carried bombs in backpacks common locally, hid these in overhead racks near the exits to enable them to exit the train quickly, and had used timing devices to cause the explosions within 11 minutes to cause the maximum panic, shock, and damage.
In sharp contrast, the local investigation into this case was marked by total incompetence, lack of coordination, and confusion. In 2009, I had written in Routledge's annual publication, India's National Security-Annual Review, that the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which originally investigated this case, had charge-sheeted 13 people for 7/11, including four who had undergone training in Pakistan. However, in September 2008, the Mumbai City Crime Branch made a startling claim in a press conference, that they had found evidence of the involvement of Sadiq Shaikh, co-founder of Indian Mujahideen (IM), in these blasts.
This claim was fundamentally challenged on May 11, 2009, when the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court discharged Shaikh, finding no evidence against him. Even earlier, the ATS and Mumbai crime branch had publicly differed on many points, with the latter claiming that the bombs for the blasts were assembled in a flat in Sewree and the RDX was procured by IM leader Riyaz Bhatkal even as ATS said that the bombs were assembled in Govandi and RDX was procured by a Pakistani terrorist, Ehsanullah, who had entered India illegally along with 10 accomplices.
All this would not have happened had the then Union government set up a central anti-terror agency. Unfortunately, they waited until December 2008 to set up such an agency (the National Investigation Agency, or NIA), after the 26/11 attacks.
In September 2015, a special MCOCA court sentenced 12 accused persons, awarding capital punishment to five and life imprisonment to seven for planting the bombs and killing passengers. It is this sentence that was set aside by the Bombay High Court on July 21, 2025 — all 12 convicted by the MCOCA court were acquitted. The special bench had heard the case for the last six months, including appeals by the State and by the convicts.
However, an inkling on the course the case would eventually take was available in January this year, from the defence put up by S Muralidhar, former chief justice of the Odisha High Court and now senior advocate, who represented two accused sentenced to life imprisonment. This was reported only in legal journals and not in the mainstream media.
Muralidhar had then highlighted the lapses in investigation, especially in obtaining confessional statements of the accused under a special provision of MCOCA, given that the officer who had recorded the confessional statement failed to identify the accused. Muralidhar had told the court: 'This is a very serious legal flaw of the trial court. Thus, this Court should now discard these statements'. He also said that the family and relatives of the accused were tortured physically, just like the accused persons.
The HC acquittal on July 21 highlights several lapses like 'cut and paste' confessions made by all the accused persons, custodial torture before the confessions were recorded, and more particularly 'the lack of any reliable material submitted' to grant prior approval to invoke the stringent MCOCA, under which confessions are legally admissible. The Court found no material was provided to the competent authority 'except reproduction of some expressions used in the definition of organised crime'.
The court said after examining two confessions recorded on two different dates: 'By any stretch of imagination, it is highly impossible to have the same questions and its sequence in both the statements with the same answers'.
This is quite telling of how poorly the investigation was handled by the police, leaving the families of the victims of the blasts and the accused and their families struggling for justice. Law enforcement agencies have a lot to answer.
Vappala Balachandran is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and was part of the two-member High Level Committee that enquired into the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. The views expressed are personal.