After nine years of incarceration, lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit on Wednesday walked out of the Taloja central jail at Taloja in Raigad district on Monday, two days after the Supreme Court granted him bail in the 2008 Malegaon blasts case.
After his release from the Taloja Jail art around 10.40 am, Purohit was taken by the waiting military officials in a car, followed by a convoy of vehicles, to the Army Headquarters at Colaba in south Mumbai. Some of his relatives also accompanied him.
The apex court had on Monday granted bail to Purohit, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, after noting that there were contradictions in the charge sheets filed by the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
Purohit was on Tuesday produced before a special NIA court, which later in the evening issued a release order for Purohit based on modified bail conditions.
Purohit was released from the Taloja jail after his lawyers and family members completed the bail formalities on Wednesday morning.
Talking to media persons outside the court premises on Tuesday, Purohit had said: “I have two families, the Army and my family which includes my wife, my two sons, sister and mother. I cannot wait to return to them”.
“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 had said.
A bench of Justices (Dr) Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi and Ranjit More of the Bombay High Court had on April 25 this year rejected the bail application of lt. Col. Prasad Shrikant Purohit, then a military intelligence official and another key accused in the case, after holding that the charges against him were “serious and grave one, inviting even punishment of death or life imprisonment” and that it did not find him entitled for bail.
lt Col Prasad Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya (who was granted bail by the Bombay High Court on April 25 2017) were two of the 11 persons charge-sheeted by the ATS on January 20, 2009, in connection with 2008 Malegaon blasts.
It may be recalled that an improvised explosive kept under the seat of a lMl Freedom motor-bicycle had exploded between Bhikku Chowk and Anjuman Chowk, near Noorani Masjid on the night of September 29, 2008, leaving six persons dead and injuring 101 others.
Purohit, who was commissioned into Maratha light Infantry in 1994 after he cleared out of the Officer’s Training Academy at Chennai, served in the counter-terrorism operations unit in Jammu and Kashmir from 2002 to 2005. He was moved to Military Intelligence due to health reasons.
Purohit, who was arrested on November 5, 2008 with the Army’s Panchmarhi unit in Madhya Pradesh, has been charged with being one of the main conspirators of the September 29, 2008 blast. He was allegedly in touch with Ramesh Upadhyay, founder of Abhinav Bharat, an extreme right wing group that was allegedly behind the 2008 blasts. It was also alleged that he had stolen from the Army RDX explosive to be used in the 2008 Malegaon blasts.
While granting bail to Purohit on Monday, Justices R K Agrawal and A M Sapre had observed: “Keeping in view the fact that NIA has submitted the supplementary chargesheet which is at variance with the chargesheet filed by the ATS, and that the trial is likely to take a long time and the appellant has been in prison for about eight years and eight months, we are of the considered view that the appellant has made out a prima facie case for release on bail and we deem it appropriate to enlarge the appellant herein on bail”.
“At the stage of granting bail, a detailed examination of evidence and elaborate documentation of the merits of the case has not to be undertaken. The grant or denial (of bail) is regulated, to a large extent, by the facts and circumstances of each particular case. But at the same time, right to bail is not to be denied merely because of the sentiments of the community against the accused,” the SC bench noted.
“liberty of a citizen is undoubtedly important, but this is to balance with the security of the community. A balance is required to be maintained between the personal liberty of the accused and the investigational rights of the agency. It must result in minimum interference with the personal liberty of the accused and the right of the agency to investigate the case,” the apex court judges said.
The SC judges said that the contradictions between the NIA and ATS charge sheets needed “to be tested at the time of trial and this court cannot pick or choose one version over the other”.