Muslim Men Accused In Malegaon Blasts Case Were Scapegoats: Mumbai Court

Mumbai: Eight Muslim men accused of carrying out bomb blasts that killed 31 people in Maharashtra's Malegaon in 2006, were made "scapegoats" by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, a Mumbai court which discharged them yesterday has said.

"It appears to me that as the accused had criminal antecedents, they became scape goats at the hands of the ATS," Special Judge V V Patil said in his order. The ATS officers "merely on suspicion," projected the accused as the authors of the blast, the judge added.

Special Judge Patil, however, refused to blame the ATS officers. The officers, he said, "had no animosity towards the accused persons... therefore, in my view as they discharged their public duty but in a wrong way".

But the case put forward by the ATS was "not acceptable," the judge said. It was "highly impossible" that the accused would have "decided to kill their own people to create disharmony between two communities that too on a holy day, Shab-e-Baarat".

 
It was not a "digestible story" that after the bomb blast, the accused again would have decided to plant a fake bomb in Mohammadiya Masjid to create terror and trigger riots. If they wished, they could have planted bombs during Ganesh immersion, so they majority of the deceased would have been Hindus, the judge said.

The ATS -- which was initially in charge of the investigation -- had arrested the men, alleging that they belonged to the banned Students Islamic Movement of India and had carried out the explosions with the help of the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar e Taiba. The Central Bureau of Investigation, which took over the case next, had confirmed the findings.

The men had got bail in 2011 after spending five years in jail - after the National Investigation Agency took over the case from the CBI. The NIA accused some others associated with a right wing group called Abhinav Bharat.

The men have alleged that they were tortured into making confessions by the police.