The court further discarded the alleged confessional statements of some of the accused in the case and said they seem to have been taken after torture was inflicted upon them.
“The confessional statements are found to be incomplete and not truthful as some parts are a copy-paste of each other. The accused persons have proved their case that torture was inflicted at the time,” the bench said.
The court also discarded the test identification parade of the accused, noting the police concerned who conducted it had no authority to do so.
The HC also refused to accept the evidence given by witnesses, that included taxi drivers who drove the accused to Churchgate railway station, those who saw the accused plant a bomb, those who were witness to bombs being assembled and those who were witness to the alleged conspiracy.
“The witness statements are not credible or trustworthy and conclusive to convict the accused. The evidence is not safe to rely on and the defence has succeeded in shattering the same,” it said.
The HC said witnesses identified the accused before the police during the identification parade four months after the incident and then in court four years later.
“These witnesses did not have enough opportunity to have seen the accused on the day of the incident to identify them correctly later. We do not find any such reasons to trigger their memory and recollect the faces,” it said.
A special court in 2015 convicted 12 persons in the case, of whom five were sentenced to death and the remaining seven were given life imprisonment.
One of the convicts died pending hearing of the appeal. Another accused, Wahid Shaikh, was acquitted by the trial court after he spent nine years in jail.
Convicts Kamal Ansari, Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rahman Shaikh, Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui, Naveed Hussain Khan and Asif Khan were handed over death penalty for planting the bombs, the other set of convicts – Tanveer Ahmed Mohammed Ibrahim Ansari, Mohammed Majid Mohammed Shafi, Shaikh Mohammed Ali Alam Shaikh, Mohammed Sajid Margub Ansari, Muzammil Ataur Rahman Shaikh, Suhail Mehmood Shaikh and Zameer Ahmed Latiur Rehman Shaikh, were granted life terms.
The appeals filed by the convicts and the State were pending disposal in the High Court from 2015. It was taken up in July 2024, after some of the convicts urged for a speedy disposal of the case.
Appearing for some of the convicts, former Orissa High Court Chief Justice
and now senior lawyer Dr S Muralidhar had pointed out the lapses in the investigation and alleged that the probe was “biased.”
“Innocent people are sent to jail and then years later when they are released from jail there is no possibility for reconstruction of their lives. From last 17 years these accused are in jail. They haven’t stepped out even for a day. The majority of their prime life is gone. In such cases where there is a public outcry, the approach by police is always to first assume guilt and then go from there,” he had said.
Muralidhar also slammed the media trial of the accused conducted in such cases.
“Police officers take press conferences in such cases, and the way the media covers the case, it kind of decides the guilt of a person. In many such terror cases, investigating agencies have failed us miserably,” he had said.
He had also argues that there is a “history of failure” in investigation related to terror incidents which has caused many innocent people to languish behind bars.
“And then after years, the accused are acquitted and then no one gets closure. We have a history of failures in probes in terror cases. But it is not too late now. The court can set it right,” he had said.
“It is not just the accused but even his children, parents, relatives get tainted. And once tainted, Milords, this society is too cruel to them. No one will treat them properly. Please consider this factor too,” he added.
