The High Court on Monday quashed the sentences awarded by the sessions court to all 12 accused in the case related to the serial bomb blasts in suburban local trains of the Western Railway in Mumbai on July 11, 2006.
Five of these 12 accused were sentenced to death and the remaining accused to life imprisonment. The court set aside the judgment of the sessions court against all these accused and ordered their immediate release.
The case was tried on three grounds: eyewitnesses, the scene of the incident, and materials seized from the accused, and confessions. However, a special bench of Justice Anil Kilor and Justice Shyam Chandak quashed the decision of the sessions court and acquitted all the accused, stating that the police could not prove any crime against the accused at all three levels.
The special bench also observed that the testimony of none of the witnesses who supported the police allegations was credible. Many technical errors were made while recording the testimony of these witnesses, or their statements were recorded many years after the incident, or they were asked to identify the accused.
The investigating agency has not given a valid reason for the delay in identifying the accused after four years. Therefore, it is not reliable for witnesses to remember the faces of the accused after all these years, an observation made by the special bench while acquitting the accused.
The court also clarified that all the accused in the case, who have been in custody for the last 19 years, will be released on bail immediately. In fact, the sessions court had convicted 13 accused in the case. However, one of the accused died. He was also sentenced to death.
The case was being heard regularly for five months before a special bench of Justices Kilor and Chandak. After a lengthy hearing, the special bench reserved its verdict on January 31. The special bench delivered the verdict in the case on Monday. At that time, the convicts sentenced to death in the case, lodged in different jails across the state, were produced for the hearing through the Telecommunication Communication (VC) system. After the verdict, the accused were told that all of them had been acquitted by the court.
Two years ago, on July 11, the government's petition and the accused's appeal against the sentence came up for hearing. At that time, the bench had said that the case could not be taken up for hearing due to the additional work of the judges. For this reason, and since it would take five to six months to complete the arguments, the bench had suggested that a request be made to the Chief Justice to constitute a new bench to hear the case. In this case, 92 government witnesses and 50 defense witnesses were examined. All the evidence is in 169 volumes.
After the special public prosecutor pointed out that the special court's verdict was also two thousand pages long, the court had directed the court to request the formation of a special bench for the case. Subsequently, a special bench of Justice Kilor and Justice Chandak was constituted to hear the case last year.
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Verdict on appeals after 10 years
The MCOCA court had also given its verdict in the case related to these bomb blasts after nine years. The MCOCA court had sentenced five out of the 13 convicted accused to death and seven to life imprisonment.
Subsequently, the case was moved to the High Court in 2015 to confirm the hanging of the five accused. A request was made to the Chief Justice to constitute a special bench to hear the case. It was accepted. However, even after that, the case could not be heard on three occasions due to the expiry of the tenure of the judges.