Malegaon bomb blast: Accused moves NIA court for action against ATS officer

In his plea, Kulkarni has referred to the NIA’s supplementary chargesheet and claimed that the ATS officer misused his position and allegedly planted evidence and requested the special court to take note of it and order legal action against the officer

Mumbai: Sameer Sharad Kulkarni, an accused in September 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case, on Monday moved a plea before the special NIA (National Investigation Agency) court to prosecute a police officer who was part of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) team that investigated the case initially and falsely implicated Sudhakar Chaturvedi in the case.

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In his plea, Kulkarni has referred to the NIA’s supplementary chargesheet and claimed that the ATS officer misused his position and allegedly planted evidence and requested the special court to take note of it and order legal action against the officer.

As per the prosecution, late in the evening on September 29, 2008, a bomb planted on a motorcycle went off opposite a religious shrine in the power-loom town, killing six people and injuring 101.

The ATS, which probed the blast case initially, had claimed that the bomb was assembled at Chaturvedi’s residence and claimed that they had found traces of RDX at his residence. The NIA had, however, doubted the evidence collected by ATS in this regard.

NIA, which took over the probe subsequently, said in its supplementary chargesheet filed in 2015, “Why API (Assistant Police Inspector, name removed to protect identity of the witness) visited the house of Chaturvedi in absence of accused, witnesses and why he requested the (NIA) witness to not tell anything about his presence at the house of Chaturvedi.”

The federal agency added that “this brings to doubt the evidentiary value of the FSL Report indicating the presence of the traces of RDX in the swabs taken from the house of Chaturvedi during a search of his house. This recovery itself becomes suspect on the ground that the ATS Mumbai may have planted the RDX traces to implicate him and the other accused persons in the case.”