NIA commences trial in Malegaon blast case

Mumbai: Two days after charges were framed a special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court on Friday commenced trial in the September 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case against Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and five other accused.

NIA submitted a list of 216 documents and 286 witnesses that include doctors, police officers, and forensic experts apart from 102 panch witnesses.

The prosecution shared these list with the court and the defence lawyers and it would be relying upon these during the trial.

Special judge Vinod Padalkar deferred hearing on the matter on November 12 after rec-eiving list of documents from special public prosecutor Avinash Rasal.

The court had on Oc-tober 30 framed charges in the case against all the seven accused Thakur, Purohit, retired Major Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwi-vedi, Sudhakar Chaturv-edi and Sameer Kulkar-ni. The court has charg-ed them under the relevant sections of IPC, Un-lawful Activities Prev-ention Act (UAPA) and Explosive Substance Act.

The NIA had filed a charge sheet in 2016 giving a clean chit to Tha-kur, Shyam Sahu, Prav-een Takalki and Shivn-arayan Kalsangra, saying it found no evidence against them. The NIA court, however, absolved only Sahu, Kalsangra and Takalki and ruled that Thakur will have to face the charges.

Col Purohit has challenged applicability of UAPA on the case saying since he was a serving as an army officer a prior sanction to prosecute him was needed and not received. His appeal for the same is pending before HC.