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Mumbai: In a significant judgment, the Bombay high court today, July 21, acquitted all 12 men who were earlier convicted and sentenced to death (five of them) and life term (seven) for “participating” in the deadly serial train blasts of July 11, 2006. The judgement came 19 years since the incident and the men have languished in jail through this time.

Only one person, Wahid Shaikh, was acquitted in 2015 after the trial court found no evidence against him. He too had languished in jail for nine years.

Abdul Wahid Shaikh at his house. Photo: File/The Wire.

Wahid told The Wire that the high court bench, comprising Justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak, fully accepted the defence’s argument that they were brutally tortured and their confessions were forcefully extracted. “We have maintained all along that not just me but all the other 12 men were falsely implicated in the case. We stand vindicated today,” an emotional Wahid said over phone.

“The real heroes were the trial lawyers. Their cross examination was outstanding. The high court has relied a lot on the cross examinations in its judgment of acquittal,” senior advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan, who was among the arguing counsels for the case, told The Wire.

The judgement copy that was made available around noon reflected Wahid’s words.

“Confessional statements were not found to be truthful and complete on various grounds, including some portions of the same were found to be similar and copied,” the 667- pages judgement stated.

Justice Kilor and Chandak also pointed out that the accused persons have “succeeded in establishing the fact of torture inflicted on them to extort confessional statements, etc.”

Confessional statements, they observed, were not found to be truthful and complete on various grounds, including some portions of the same were found to be similar and copied. “Identical Part-I and Part-II of some of the confessional statements,” the judgement points out, as one of the 10 points for accepting the defence’s argument that the defendants were physically and mentally tortured.

Over the past six months, the high court had heard the appeals filed by both the government and the convicted men. This acquittal raises serious questions on the role played by the state investigating agency, in this case the Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS), in probing the case.

On July 11, 2006, seven bombs had exploded in different local trains on the western line of the Mumbai railways. A total of 189 persons had died and over 820 were seriously injured. The police’s case was that the accused persons had assembled bombs in a pressure cooker and had planted it on the train in the evening, which is a very busy time for commuters in the city.  

The Congress government, which was in power in the state then, had handed over the investigation immediately to the state ATS. Several cases handled by the ATS around that period under the Congress leadership, including the Malegaon 2006 blast case, have raised serious questions of the communal biases in the police and wrong implication of Muslim youth in terror cases.

In Malegaon 2006 blast case, the Muslim........

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