19 years on, HC acquits all 12 men in 7/11 train blasts case

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court on Monday acquitted all the 12 accused--including 5 men on death row—who had been convicted by a special MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act) court for planning and orchestrating the July 11, 2006 serial blasts on Mumbai suburban rail network. These men, now acquitted, have spent 19 years in prison. One of them died while awaiting his appeal. Sajid Ansari, one of the men acquitted, is currently out on parole. He is seen here in his Mira Road home, against the mountain of documents that helped him fight his case. (photo by Raju Shinde) (Raju Shinde)
The serial train blasts were one of the deadliest terror attacks in India. They killed 188 people and left 829 injured. These seven blasts, spread over six minutes of evening rush hour, were so powerful that they ripped through the double layered thick steel roofs and sides of each of the seven compartments.
But the investigations into this deadly attack, led by the Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), was so hurried and shoddy that a division bench of justices Anil S. Kilor and Shyam C. Chandak observed on Monday: 'Creating a false appearance of having solved a case by presenting that the accused have been brought to justice gives a misleading sense of resolution. This deceptive closure undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large.' While acquitting all the 13 accused they added that the prosecution had, 'utterly failed to establish the offence beyond the reasonable doubt against the accused on each count,' and that it was unsafe to base the convictions on evidence adduced by the prosecution.
A total of 13 men were arrested by the Maharashtra ATS headed by IPS officer KP Raghuvanshi within four months of the blasts. The agency claimed that the blasts were the handiwork of some former members of the proscribed Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) with support from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan. The agency further claimed that LeT commander Azam Cheema had trained some of the arrested accused to handle arms and explosives and had also provided RDX for the attack.
But a closer scrutiny of the case by the High Court revealed a trail of cut-paste confessions, unreliable witness narratives, material evidence handled without care and vital call data records hastily destroyed--a case study in shoddy investigation.
Briefly, this is what the ATS claimed: Twelve Pakistani bomb-making experts illegally entered India with RDX-- six from Indo-Bangla border, four from the Rajasthan border and two from India-Nepal border—and come to Mumbai to assemble the bombs at the Chembur house of one of the accused, Mohammed Faisal Shaikh. However, this claim of the Pakistani infiltrators was based on the confessional statement of the accused and no antecedents of the infiltrators were established. A dossier by Maharashtra government on the Pakistanis was never made public and neither was it given to the accused when they sought access to it under the Right To Information.
In its chargesheet against the 13 Indians it arrested, the ATS relied on the confessional statements of 11 of the accused. It later turned out that most of the confessions were a cut-copy-paste job.
On 2015, the special MCOCA trial court acquitted one man, a school teacher Abdul Wahid Shaikh, one of the two men who had refused to confess, and convicted the remaining 12. Five of them were awarded the death penalty.
The convicted men challenged their conviction and sentence. The Bombay High Court heard these appeals together with reference for confirmation of the death sentence handed down to the five convicts. Justice S Nagamuthu, retired judge of the Madras High Court, former Delhi High Court Justice Dr S. Murlidhar, senior advocates Nitya Ramakrishnan and Yug Mohit Chaudhry argued their cases, successfully pointing out the loopholes in the prosecution's case.
The prosecution case was based mainly on eyewitness accounts, recoveries made by the ATS at the behest of the arrested accused, and confessional statements of the 11 accused which were recorded between October 4 and 25, 2006. The police had relied on accounts of two taxi drivers who claimed to have ferried two of the accused to Churchgate railway stations on July 11, 2006, and some passengers who claimed to have seen some of these accused while they were planting the bombs on the trains.
The High Court on Monday refused to accept their evidence because their police statements were recorded 100 days after the blasts, and they identified the accused they claimed to have seen four years after the blasts. The division bench held the witnesses had no reason and occasion to remember faces of the accused persons amid a crowd after such a long gap.
The court drew adverse inference from the fact that the ATS did not examine some other witnesses whose police statements were recorded immediately after the blasts and also rejected the evidence of the test identification parade, holding that the special executive officer who conducted the TIP, lacked the authority to do so.
The bench also refused to accept the evidence of recovery of RDX, granules, detonators, cooker, printed circuit boards, soldering gun, books, maps, etc. from the accused persons after noticing that the articles were not properly sealed after their seizure until they were sent for examination to the forensic science laboratories, and therefore, the corroborative evidence could not be taken into consideration.
As regards the confessional statements, the bench noted that portions of the statements were cut-copy-paste and the documents did not seem to be prepared by the concerned authorities, raising doubts over the compliance of procedural safeguards and norms to be followed.
The court also refused to accept the genuineness of the confessions, holding that the accused had succeeded in proving that they were tortured in ATS custody for giving confessions and the fact that they had retracted the confessions before the trial court.
The court also refused to rely on the confessional statements recorded under provisions of the MCOCA due to serious doubts over applicability of certain condition required under the Act.
Additionally, the court questioned the investigators for not giving the accused an opportunity to consult their lawyers on record before their confessions were recorded. 'When their confessions were recorded, all the accused were represented by lawyers on record, but at the crucial stage of recording confession, the accused were not made aware of their right to consult their lawyers, thus violating their fundamental rights,' the court observed.
CDR, a vital piece of evidence destroyed
In order to prove the charge of conspiracy, the prosecution had relied on the Call Detail Records (CDR) of all the accused to point out that they were in touch with the LeT operatives based in Pakistan, but later the prosecution changed its stand and chose not to rely on the CDRs. However, when the accused persons tried to use the same CDRs to prove their innocence, the police claimed that they had destroyed the material collected since they were not relying on them any longer.
The judges said that the CDRs of the accused could have proved the connection of the accused with the LeT and the planning of the blasts. 'The prosecution stated that the CDRs were destroyed which raises serious doubts over the integrity of the investigation conducted by the agency, and amounts to a grave violation of the right to a fair trial,' the bench stated.
The ATS said they would consult the special public prosecutor Raja Thakre on the future course of action after studying Monday's judgment.