Judgement day for Ajmer shrine blast
LONG WAIT Court to decide fate of 9 accused after 10 years
JAIPUR : Almost 10 years after a bomb blast rocked the Ajmer Dargah of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti on the evening of October 11, 2007, the fate of nine people with alleged links to the attack will be decided on Saturday by a special NIA court in Jaipur.
The blast killed three people and injured 15. An unexploded bomb was also found on the sprawling dargah compound, which was crowded with devotees at the time of the blast because it was the month of Ramzan.
A decade-long investigation saw the case being transferred from the Rajasthan Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) to the NIA (National Investigative Agency) in 2011, and involved the examination of 149 witnesses and 449 documents by the prosecution.
The investigations had revealed the alleged involvement of saffron groups in the powerful explosion with several accused figuring in other cases, such as the Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad and the Samjhauta Express blast.
The case also saw a number of witnesses turning hostile and retracting from their statements made under sections 164 and 161 of CrPC. “So far 26 witnesses have turned hostile in the case since the trial started in June 2014; most of them were key witnesses for the prosecution,” public prosecutor Ashwini Sharma told HT.
The accused in the case whose fate will be decided include former Rashtriya Sawamsevak Sangh (RSS) pracharak Swami Aseemanand who is also an accused in the Samjhauta Express and Mecca Masjid blast cases.
Aseemanand was arrested in November 2010, three years after the blast, by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) from an ashram in Haridwar where he was living under an alias.
Another RSS pracharak, Sunil Joshi, also figures in the list of the accused charge-sheeted by the NIA. Joshi was shot dead on December 29, 2007 in Madhya Pradesh, allegedly by his own men. Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma, Mukesh Vasani, Swami Aseemanand, Bharat Mohan, Bhavesh Bhai Patel and Mehul are in jail. Three other accused -Sandeep Dange, Ramchandra and Suresh Nair -- are absconding and carry a bounty of ₹10 lakh each; Chandrashekhar Leve is out on bail.
The trial ended on February 6.