ATS officer denies the charge of planting explosives at Malegaon blast accused’s home

A Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad officer denies allegations that he planted explosives at the house of a 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case accused Sudhakar Chaturvedi. The officer claims that the allegations are an afterthought and that the NIA took statements from two army personnel and based on their claims, false allegations had been levelled against him. The NIA had doubted the evidence collected by ATS in this regard.

MUMBAI: A Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) officer has denied the allegation that he planted explosives at the house of the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case accused Sudhakar Chaturvedi.

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The then-ATS officer claimed that Chaturvedi started levelling the allegations in 2015 after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed its chargesheet.

The officer in question claimed that all the allegations were nothing but an afterthought. “The bomb blast took place in September 2008 and these allegations for the first time came in 2015 when I read the same in newspapers. My father was an army officer. Nothing of these sorts had happened,” the officer said.

The officer was examined as a witness before the special NIA court as regards the investigation done by him in the 2008 bomb blast case and during his testimony was confronted by defence lawyers with the allegation that he had planted RDX at Chaturvedi’s house – to ensure that traces of the explosives found in forensic samples.

The officer claimed that the NIA took statements from two army personnel and based on their claims, false allegations had been levelled against him. “This is a conspiracy hatched after recording statements of the two army officers and was intended to defame me,” the officer told the court.

The ATS, which probed the blast case initially, had claimed that the bomb was assembled at Chaturvedi’s residence, and it 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, had in its supplementary chargesheet filed in 2015 questions as to “why API (assistant police inspector - name removed to protect the identity of the witness) visited the house of Sudhakar Chaturvedi in the absence of the accused or any independent witness and why he requested a witness not to tell anything about his presence at the house of Sudhakar Chaturvedi.”

“It is pertinent to mention here that the ATS searched the house of Sudhakar Chaturvedi on 25/11/2008 from where they had taken the swab of RDX. This creates doubt on this recovery of swabs of RDX,” the NIA had stated in the chargesheet.

The federal agency further said 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 Sudhakar 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.”