A NIA court in Hyderabad will pronounce its judgement on Monday in the Mecca Masjid blast case, almost 11 years after a powerful bomb went off during the Friday congregation.
The incident on May 18, 2007 had left 9 people killed and 58 others injured and another five people died in subsequent police firing on the crowd outside the mosque.
The fourth additional metropolitan sessions court which also deals with the Cases of National investigation Agency will pronounce the judgment after hearing the final argument of the prosecution and defence counsels.
The ten accused belonging to Abhinav Bharat and other right wing Hindu organisations include Devender Gupta, lokesh Sharma alias Ajay Tiwari, Nabakumar Sircar alias Swami Aseemanand, lakshman Das Maharaj, Mohanlal Rateshwar and Rajender Chowdhary.
Two accused Ramchandra Kalsangra and Sandeep Dange remain absconding while another Sunil Joshi was killed by unknown assailants.
During the trial prosecution listed 226 witnesses but 64 of them including lt. Col. Srikant Purohit turned hostile.
Swami Aseemanand, Pracharak of RSS had given a confessional statement before the magistrate but later retracted it. Even this document had gone missing at the latter stage of the trial. However officials traced the document later. In his statement Aseemanand had admitted his role in the planning of the blast and provided the details of others who were involved in conspiracy and planting of the bomb in the historic mosque. While one bomb had exploded under a marble bench near the abolition tank in the court yard another bomb failed to explode and it was disposed off by the police bomb squad later.
The case saw many dramatic ups and downs before the CBI unravelled the conspiracy of Hindu right wing groups behind the blast.
Initially the case was booked at the Hussainialam police station in Hyderabad, a special investigation team (SIT) took up the investigation and arrested more than 100 Muslim youth suspecting the hands of Muslim groups behind the blast. As the allegations of illegal detentions and torture in custody caused an uproar, police booked 26 youth on charges of conspiracy and let off others. A local court acquitted even those 26 youth.
later the SIT headed by Joint Commissioner Harsh Gupta was disbanded and the state government handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation.
The breakthrough was achieved by the CBI when it arrested Devender Gupta and lokesh Sharma during their probe into a similar blast in Dargah of Ajmer in Rajasthan. The investigation also threw up the links of the Hindu groups to various other blasts.