NINETEEN years after seven train blasts here killed more than 180 persons, the Bombay High Court on Monday acquitted all the 12 accused convicted by a lower court, saying, the prosecution “utterly failed” to prove the case and it was “hard to believe the accused committed the crime”. The judgement comes as a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) which probed the case. The agency had claimed that the accused were members of the banned outfit Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and had hatched the conspiracy with Pakistani members of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). In a damning indictment of the prosecution’s case, the High Court declared all confessional statements of the accused as inadmissible suggesting “copying”.

 

Further eroding the credibility of the confessions, the court said the accused had successfully established that torture was inflicted upon them to extort these confessional statements. A special bench of Justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak said the prosecution has failed to even bring on record the type of bombs used in the crime and that the evidence relied on by it was not conclusive to convict the accused. “Punishing the actual perpetrator of a crime is a concrete and essential step toward curbing criminal activities, upholding the rule of law, and ensuring the safety and security of citizens,” HC said in its 671-page judgement. But 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, it added. “This deceptive closure undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large. Essentially, this is what the case at hand conveys,” the bench said.