2008 Malegaon blast: BJP's Pragya Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Purohit among 7 acquitted

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3 days ago

A special court in Mumbai acquitted Bharatiya Janata Party leader Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit and five others on Thursday in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, The Indian Express reported.
Judge AK Lahoti of the National Investigation Agency court also directed the Maharashtra government to pay a compensation of Rs 2 lakh to the families of those who died in the blast and Rs 50,000 to the persons who were injured.
Six persons were killed and around 100 were injured when an explosive device strapped to a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon in northern Maharashtra on September 29, 2008.
Thakur and Purohit were arrested later that year. Five others – Major Ramesh Upadhyay, Sameer Kulkarni, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi and Sudhakar Chaturvedi – were also named accused in the case.
All seven of them were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Indian Penal Code. The case was initially investigated by the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad. It was transferred to the National Investigation Agency in 2011.
On Thursday, the judge said the prosecution had proved that a blast occurred in Malegaon, ANI reported. However, it failed to prove that a bomb was placed in that particular motorcycle, he added.
'The bike allegedly involved in the blast did not have a clear chassis number,' the Hindustan Times quoted Lahoti as saying. 'Prosecution could not prove that it was in [Thakur's] possession immediately before the blast.'
A chassis number, also known as the Vehicle Identification Number, is a code that can identify the motorcycle and provide information about its make, model and year, among other specifications.
The court also said that the site of the blast was not barricaded properly by the police, which led to the contamination of evidence, The Times of India reported.
Lahoti further noted that some medical certificates had been manipulated, adding that the actual number of those injured in the blast was 95 and not the initially reported 101.
The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act cannot be invoked in the case as the 'sanction was not taken as per rules', the court added.
Thakur was a BJP MP from Bhopal between 2019 and 2024.