Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Monday refused to grant a stay on the framing of charges on accused by a special NIA court on the request of Col Prasad Purohit.
The court admitted for hearing his appeal challenging the applicability of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in the Malegaon 2008 blast case but posted the hearing on the appeal for next month.
The division bench of Justice S.S. Shinde and Justice A.S. Gadkari dire-cted Sandesh Patil, the counsel of National Investigation Agency (NIA), to file a reply to Purohit’s petition by November 21, when the matter would be heard again.
Mr Patil, on behalf of the NIA, had informed the court that he had not received the copy of the appeal and sought time to file a reply.
On the other hand, advocate Mateen Shaikh, on behalf of intervener Syed Nisar — whose son Azhar died in the blast, opposed the plea. He pointed out that the apex court as well as the high court had already expedited this matter.
The bench while refusing to grant a stay on the proceedings of the trial court observed that the Supreme Court and the Bombay high court had passed orders directing the trial court to conduct a day-to-day hearing on the matter.
The framing of charges is a process after which the trial in a criminal case starts and hence the ben-ch refused to allow Col. Purohit’s request to grant a stay on the trial until his appeal was decided.
Purohit has claimed that he could not be prosecuted under UAPA because he was a serving army officer and a prior government sanction was requi-red to prosecute him und-er this law and this sanction was not obtained.
Besides Purohit, the other accused in the case are Pragya Singh Thakur, Major (retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, Sameer Kulkarni, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi and Sudhakar Chaturvedi.
