As a consequence of the new turn that the probe into the 2006 Malegaon blasts assumed after it took over the case in 2011, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday filed a comprehensive charge-sheet against four right wing Hindu activists, in the much-discussed triple blasts case.
The charge-sheet, running in to five volumes, was filed against accused lokesh Sharma, Dhan Singh, Manohar Singh and Rajendra Choudhary, in a Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (Mcoca) Court of Special Judge Prithviraj Chavan. But importantly it didn’t mention the names of Swami Aseemanand, former lt Col Srikant Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh.
The charge-sheet named Ramji Kalsangra as an absconding accused in the case.
On Wednesday’s, fresh charge-sheet filed in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case. It replaced the charge-sheet filed by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) against nine accused — all Muslims — earlier. In the triple blasts that rocked Bada Kabarasthan, Mushawra Chowk and Hamidiya Masjid at Malegaon in North Maharashtra on September 8, 2006, 37 people were killed and 150 others injured.
The Maharashtra ATS, which had initially investigated the triple Malegaon blasts, had filed a 2,800-page charge-sheet against the nine accused in the case, before the MCOCA court on December 21, 2006.
The day the State ATS filed the charge-sheet in the special court, the Maharashtra Government handed over the case to the CBI. Incidentally, all the nine accused against whom the State SIT filed a charge-sheet were Muslims.
The NIA, which took over the investigations from the CBI on March 22, 2011 expanded the scope of investigations into the blasts in the light of a confession made by Swami Aseemanand in the Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid blast case under Section 164 of the CrPC before a Magistrate on December 18, 2010. Malegaon had seen another terror act in 2008 allegedly by right-wing Hindu groups and Sadhvi Pragya Singh and former lt Col Srikant Purohit were arrested in connection with it.
In a major slap on the face of the Maharashtra ATS that investigated the case earlier, a MCOCA court on November 5, 2011 granted bail to all nine Muslim accused in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case, after the NIA preferred not to oppose their release in view of the “new findings and circumstances in the form of evidences”.
In the fresh charge-sheet on Wednesday, the NIA has named Chaudhary as one of the main conspirators in execution of multiple blasts in Malegaon.
Dhan Singh is said to have confessed to the NIA sleuths that he had visited Malegaon along with Kalsangra, Choudhary and Amit Halka alias Prince on September 1, 2006 and left for Indore the same evening after a recce of target locations.