The Bombay high court on Monday acquitted all 12 people convicted for the 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts that killed 189 people, overturning five death sentences and seven life terms in an order that lambasted the investigation for “cut-paste” confessions and said the prosecution “utterly failed” to prove the case.
On an otherwise nondescript Tuesday evening in Mumbai 19 years ago, seven bombs exploded in local trains between 6.23pm and 6.29pm during peak commute, targeting hundreds of people making their way home on the city’s most popular public transit service. The blasts killed more people than the 2008 terror attacks, and injured nearly 900, in what remains one of India’s worst ever such strikes.
Four months after the blasts, the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad arrested 13 people. A local court in 2015 convicted all but one. But on Monday, the high court found glaring gaps in the probe and cleared 12 men, all Muslims, many of whom had spent 19 years behind bars and one died in 2021.
“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,” said a special division bench of justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak, setting aside the 2015 convictions by the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court.
{{/usCountry}}“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,” said a special division bench of justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak, setting aside the 2015 convictions by the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court.
{{/usCountry}}“The prosecution has utterly failed to prove the case against the accused. It is hard to believe that the accused committed the crime. Hence their conviction is quashed and set aside,” the high court added in its 671-page verdict.
Victims of the blasts expressed dismay. “Justice got killed...the law of the land failed today,” said Chirag Chauhan, a survivor who is now wheelchair-bound and a practising chartered accountant.
The Maharashtra government said it will challenge the acquittal in the Supreme Court. “I will go through the entire order. I have discussed with the lawyers, and the high court verdict will be challenged in the Supreme Court,” said chief minister Devendra Fadnavis.
The acquitted men said they were vindicated. “Everyone at home is overjoyed and we have been having sweets all morning. It hasn’t fully sunk in,” said Sajid Margub Ansari, who was released on parole on July 1.
The Maharashtra ATS, headed by Indian Police Service (IPS) officer KP Raghuvanshi, had argued that the serial 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. It also said LeT commander Azam Cheema trained some of the arrested accused to handle arms and explosives and had also provided RDX for the attack.
But a closer scrutiny 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. The verdict also said the confessions appeared to have been coerced by torture.
“If we see each of the confessional statements, it can be realised that the earlier part of the confessional statement, i.e., the portion barring the relevant portion in bold, the narration is in detail and the information is provided in depth. Whereas, when it comes to the narration in relation to the bomb blasts, the information given by each of the accused is not only vague but also does not throw much light on the aspects, as regards which, the prosecution also could not find out any evidence,” said the court.
The bombs, which were placed in the first-class compartments, went off near the Matunga Road, Mahim Junction, Bandra, Khar Road, Jogeshwari, Bhayandar and Borivali stations.
Kamal Ansari, Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rahman Shaikh, Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui, Naveed Hussain Khan and Asif Khan were convicted under sections 302 (murder), 120B (criminal conspiracy) and other of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections 3(1)(I), 3(1)(ii) and 3(4) of MCOCA.
A MCOCA court sentenced them to death in 2015. Kamal Ansari died in 2021 of Covid-19 after 15 years in jail.
The MCOCA court also handed life sentences to Tanveer Ahmed Mohammed Ibrahim Ansari, Mohammed Majid Mohammed Shafi, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Alam Shaikh, Mohammed Sajid Margub Ansari, Muzammil Ataur Rahman Shaikh, Suhail Mehmood Shaikh and Zameer Ahmed Rehman Shaikh.
Only one accused, Wahid Shaikh, was acquitted by the MCOCA court.
The ATS case was this: Twelve Pakistani bomb-makers illegally entered India with RDX – six from the Bangladesh border, four from the Rajasthan border and two from Nepal border – and came to Mumbai to assemble the bombs at the Chembur house of one of the accused, Mohammed Faisal Shaikh.
However, this claim was based on the confessional statement of the accused and no antecedents of the infiltrators were established, found the high court. A dossier by Maharashtra government on the Pakistanis was never made public, nor was it given to the accused when they sought access to it under the Right To Information Act.
The prosecution case was based mainly on eyewitness accounts, recoveries made by 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 high court refused to accept their evidence because their police statements were recorded 100 days after the blasts, and eyewitnessesidentified 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 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.
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.
“On perusal of the record of the confessional statements of all the accused, admittedly, all eight documents were prepared by concerned DCPs relating to each accused. Therein, we noticed variation in mentioning of offences. Similarly, we found that some parts of the questions and the answers are identical verbatim. Then, we noticed missing of stamp of DCP, similarity in questions and answers and also in putting dots in the subject of the letter correspondence made between DCPs and the Chief I.O.”, the court said.
The court also refused to rely on the confessional statements recorded under provisions of the MCOCA due to serious doubts over applicability of certain conditions required under the act. Additionally, the court questioned the investigators for not giving the accused an opportunity to consult their lawyers before their confessions were recorded.