2006 train blasts: After 6-month-long hearings, Bombay HC reserves verdict on death confirmation pleas and appeals against convictions

On July 11, 2006, a series of bombs ripped through seven western suburban coaches, killing 189 commuters and injuring 824. After an over eight-year trial, a special court under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act (MCOCA) in October 2015 awarded the death penalty to five of the convicts and life terms to seven others.

The death row convicts included Kamal Ansari from Bihar, Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rahman Shaikh from Mumbai, Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui from Thane, Naveed Hussain Khan from Secunderabad and Asif Khan from Jalgaon in Maharashtra. All of them were found guilty of planting the bombs.

The seven awarded life imprisonment were 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. One of the accused, Wahid Shaikh, was acquitted by the trial court after nine years of jail.

In 2015, the Maharashtra government approached the high court, seeking the confirmation of death row granted to the five convicts, who also filed appeals challenging their convictions. However, Ansari died due to Covid-19 in Nagpur prison in 2021. The convicts who were sent to life imprisonment have also filed appeals against the same in the high court.

After the accused sought early disposal of the matter, In July 2024, a special bench of Justices Anil S Kilor and Shyam C Chandak was formed and has been hearing the death confirmation pleas and appeals against convictions since then and concluded the same on Friday.

The state government had in 2022 told the high court that the hearing on confirmation petitions would take at least five to six months as there were 92 prosecution witnesses and over 50 defence witnesses. Evidence in the case ran over 169 volumes and judgments of death sentences nearly 2,000 pages.

Advocates Yug Mohit Chaudhry and Payoshi Roy, who argued for all accused persons for over three months, submitted that their extra-judicial confessional statements obtained by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) through ‘torture’ were inadmissible in law. They said that while the accused had not initially confessed, their extra-judicial confessions were obtained after MCOCA was invoked against them, and the same raised suspicion about the probe. The lawyers submitted that responses in at least 5 of 11 confessions are identical to each other and appeared to be copy-pasted. They further claimed that the prosecution had destroyed the Call Data Records (CDR) of the accused even though they had claimed that their location of the relevant time would show they were not at the blast site.

Appearing for two of the convicts – Muzammil Shaikh and Zameer Shaikh – senior lawyer S Muralidhar (former Delhi HC judge) earlier this month argued that they were innocent and had been languishing in jail for 18 years without any sufficient and substantial evidence to prove charges against them. Muralidhar had said that the prime years of the accused are gone in incarceration.

On Friday, during the last hearing, one of the accused Navee Hussain, lodged at Nagpur Central Prison, appeared before the court through virtual mode and alleged that he was falsely implicated in the case and had no role in the same. He said that “while the people lost their lives in the train blast, retribution should not mean that innocent people are hanged.”

Senior advocates Nitya Ramakrishnan and S Nagamuthu representing other accused also argued that cases against them were false and the trial court erred in convicting the accused persons.

Senior advocate Raja Thakare, appointed as special public prosecutor (SPP) representing Maharashtra government, had sought confirmation of death penalties citing that sufficient evidence was produced by the probing agency to show it was a ‘rarest of rare’ category case.