NEW DELHI: A special NIA court on Thursday acquitted all seven Hindu extremists tried for their roles in the Malegaon 2008 terror blast case in which six died and over a hundred were injured.

This is a case in which NIA special public prosecutor Rohini Salian resigned claiming that the NIA was going out of its way to water down the case and had been given a standing instruction to go easy on the “Hindu terror” accused, reports said.

BJP leader and former MP Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit, Major Ramesh Upadhyay (retired), Ajay Rahirkar, Sameer Kulkarni, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sudhakar Dhar Dwivedi all stand acquitted.

“Terror has no religion because no religion can advocate violence,” the special NIA court judge, A. K. Lahoti, said. The court began with reading the prosecution’s arguments and the accounts of the witnesses examined in the case.

Hemand Karkare, a police official who was killed in Mumbai attacks of Nov 26, 2008, initially led the investigation

The prosecution successfully established that a blast happened on Sept 29, 2008, but were not able to prove that the bike was used for the blast, the court noted. The prosecution was able to establish deaths and injuries due to blast, it held.

On Sept 29, 2008, a bomb went off at the Bhikku Chowk in Malegaon, a satellite town in Nashik district, once famous for its power loom industry. In the immediate aftermath, a first information report was lodged with the local police. Eventually, the investigation was handed over to the Maharashtra state Anti-Terrorism Squad. Then ATS chief Hemand Karkare, who was killed in the Mumbai terror attack the same year on Nov 26, initially led the investigation.

No fingerprints or DNA was collected on time from the spot, the court said. This court came to the conclusion that the forensic science laboratory cannot be relied upon as there was contamination of forensic evidence.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad had claimed that an improvised explosive device or IED had been planted on an LML Freedom motorcycle, which they claimed belonged to Thakur.

This claim was denied by Thakur, who said she had sold it long before the terror blast. The ATS has claimed that the bike carried a fake number plate and that its engine number and chassis number had also been erased in the blast.

There was no cogent and reliable evidence to show that Pragya Singh Thakur had access to the bike. “She had renounced the material world two years before the incident when she accepted sainthood,” the court said.

The court also said that chassis tampering of the bike could not be established either.

In court, Thakur said that the “illegal activities done [ostensibly meaning that they were done by investigating agencies] had destroyed her life. “I am a saint, so I suppose that is why I am still alive,” she said. She said she has died several times in her efforts to remain alive in the last 17 years. Thakur, who has lauded Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse publicly, appreciated the judge for parsing through the facts.

Published in Dawn, Aug 1st, 2025