The Supreme Court will hear the Maharashtra government's plea against the Bombay High Court verdict acquitting all 12 accused in the 2006 Mumbai train bomb blasts case on July 24.
A bench of Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justices K Vinod Chandran and N V Anjaria on Tuesday took note of the urgent mentioning of the state’s appeal against the Bombay High Court’s July 21 verdict by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and said it will be listed for Thursday. "It is a serious matter. The SLP (special leave petition) is ready. Please list it tomorrow. There is urgency... Still there are some important issues to be looked at," the law officer said.
The CJI referred to newspaper reports that eight persons have been released from prison following the high court judgment.
On Monday, a special high court bench of Justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak acquitted all the 12 accused, saying the prosecution utterly failed to prove the case and it was "hard to believe the accused committed the crime".
Of the 12, five had been sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment by the special court. These included Kamal Ansari, Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rahman Shaikh, Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui , Naveed Hussain Khan, Asif Khan,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 Latiur Rehman Shaikh. Kamal Ansari died in Nagpur prison during 2021.
More than 180 people died during the seven blasts that ripped through Mumbai local trains at various locations on the western line on July 11, 2006.
The high court allowed the appeals filed by the accused challenging their conviction and sentences imposed on them by a special court in 2015.
The high court verdict came as a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) which probed the case. The agency claimed that the accused were members of the banned outfit Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and hatched the conspiracy with Pakistani members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
In its damning indictment of the prosecution's case, the high court declared all confessional statements of the accused as inadmissible and suggested "copying”.
Further eroding the credibility of the confessions, the court said the accused had established that torture was inflicted upon them to extort these confessional statements.
