Special court rejects 7/11 train blast convict’s plea for action against three witnesses

The MCOCA court said that Siddiqui’s plea was devoid of any merit. “After seven years (of the judgement in the case), the applicant prayed to initiate action against the three witnesses. There is no explanation as to the delay in filing this application,” special judge AM Patil said while rejecting the plea.

Mumbai: A special MCOCA court on Monday rejected the plea of 7/11 convict, Ehtesham Siddiqui, for conducting an enquiry into testimonies of three prosecution witnesses and for taking appropriate action against the three, who he claimed falsely implicated him resulting in his conviction.

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The MCOCA court said that Siddiqui’s plea was devoid of any merit. “After seven years (of the judgement in the case), the applicant prayed to initiate action against the three witnesses. There is no explanation as to the delay in filing this application,” special judge AM Patil said while rejecting the plea.

Siddiqui had filed the plea on August 4, last year, against Mohammad Alam Quraishi, Amar Khan and Vishal Parmar who were examined as prosecution witnesses. He claimed that the three witnesses had deposed falsely resulting in his conviction and he has now been awarded a death sentence.

Quraishi had claimed that he had seen some guests from Pakistan at the house of one accused and said the accused told the name of those guests as Abdul Razzak, Abu Umaid, Sohail Shaikh and Salim. As per this witness, Abdul Razzak, who was in India but settled in Pakistan, had brought three Pakistani – Sohail Shaikh, who assembled the bomb at the house of the accused, Salim who was killed in the blast while planting the bomb and Abu Umaid who was killed in an encounter by the ATS Officer. Abdul Razzak, a resident of Hyderabad, had brought the three persons from Pakistan in May 2006.

However, Siddiqui claimed that “he recently got information that Abdul Razzak died by suicide on October 10, 2012. He was arrested in 2005 and released on bail in 2007. After suicide, one suicide note was found in his shirt pocket which reveals that he had committed suicide as he was fed up due to cases. When Abdul Razzak was in custody in the year 2006, then how it could be believed that he brought three Pakistanis via the Kutch border in May 2006 and therefore deposition of Mohd Alam is false and concocted.”

As for Khan, Siddiqui said that “he had gone to Govandi before the bomb blast and met Mohammed Ali and saw Tanvir Ahamed. He identified him and accused him before the court as the activist of SIMI. He also pointed out that this witness was also the witness in a sessions court case in 2014. In that case, he did not support the case of the prosecution. He had deposed that he does not know Mohammed Ali Shaikh and was not aware of the members’ office bearers of SIMI. This deposition is contrary to the deposition in this case and therefore it is proved that he has given false evidence.”