Shrikant Purohit was doing his job: Lawyer

Mumbai: The lawyers of Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Purohit, an accused and bail applicant in the September 2008 Malegaon blast case, argued before the Bombay high court that as an army intelligence officer, in order to gather intelligence on the co-accused it was his job to interact with them by “being one of them.”

The lawyers said Purohit had been duly informing his then superiors about his activities and yet he was accused. Col Purohit’s lawyer’s arguments are expected to end on Thursday.

Purohit’s lawyer Shrikant Shivde argued before that Purohit is the most successful intelligence officer of the Indian Army and has gathered information about SIMI and Naxals based on which several successful army operations have been carried out in the past.

He also argued that the first rule of gathering intelligence is to infiltrate in those groups and become one of them because to gain complete confidence and get information from them you need to be one of them. “I (Purohit) associated myself with the co-accused, anti-nationals, to get info for the Indian Army,” said Purohit. “The biggest pain in my heart and shocking thing is that I did the most difficult work for this country, but now I am labelled as terrorist,” argued advocate Shivde on behalf of Purohit. He produced the copy of court of inquiry conducted by Army to prove that he was informing his superiors about all the meetings.

Relying on the post-mortem report, advocate Shivde on Tuesday had claimed that the wanted co-accused Ramji Kalsangra and Sandeep Dange have been killed by the Maharashtra ATS and their bodies have been disposed of as those of 26/11 terror attacks victims.