Malegaon blast accused Lt Col Prasad Purohit, granted bail by top court, left Mumbai jail this morning
An SUV, a sedan and two jeeps, all with military registration numbers, along with two Army trucks pulled up at Mumbai's Taloja jail this morning to escort Lt Col Prasad Srikanth Purohit to Pune, where he will join the last Army unit in which he was posted before his arrest in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blasts case.
Lt Col Purohit left prison after nine years, two days after the Supreme Court gave him bail. The officer has to report to his unit within 24 hours of his release. He was suspended after his arrest in 2008, but, his lawyer said, the suspension was revoked after a court of inquiry.
The officer has said he wants to rejoin the Army as soon as possible. "I want to wear my uniform. It is outermost layer of my skin. I am wedded to it. I am very happy to get back into the service of the best organisation in the country if not the world, the Indian Army," he told reporters outside a Mumbai court on Tuesday. He will report at the Southern Command in Pune in uniform.
Two bombs planted on a motorcycle exploded in on September 29, 2008, killing seven people and injuring over a 100 in Malegaon, a textile town in Maharashtra 270 km from Mumbai. Lt Col Purohit was among those arrested.
He is accused of floating Abhinav Bharat, a right-wing group that allegedly planned and executed the blasts, and also of collecting huge funds and using them to procure arms and explosives and organising meetings where the Malegaon attack was planned.
The Army officer has maintained that he was assigned by military intelligence to infiltrate various terror organisations and that his superiors knew about his actions and association with Abhinav Bharat. He has claimed that the statements of witnesses against him are fabricated and that due process was not followed in prosecuting him as an officer of the Indian Army, even writing to then Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar last year.
His lawyers have alleged that the previous Congress-led UPA government tried to project the case as a right wing conspiracy. Welcoming the Supreme Court's order for bail, Lt Col Purohit's wife, Aparna, said "questions of political influences damaged our case" for several years.
Senior lawyer Harish Salve, who represented Lt Col Purohit in the Supreme Court, said the case should be judged on its merits and politics should not be allowed to overshadow it.
Lt Col Purohit appealed in the Supreme Court against a Bombay High Court order earlier this year denying him bail. The High Court had granted bail then to Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, who was also accused of plotting the Malegaon attack. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) said it had no evidence against the Sadhvi, but enough proof of Lt Col Purohit's role in the blasts.
On Monday, the Supreme Court granted bail to Lt Col Purohit pointing out that there were "material contradictions" in the chargesheets filed by Maharashtra's Anti-Terror Squad and the NIA, which later took over the case and that these need to be tested at the time of trial.
The court observed that the officer has already spent a long time in jail and that the trial is likely to stretch too.