Mumbai 2006 train blasts case: Why Bombay HC acquitted all the men convicted by a special court in 2015

What is the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case?

On July 11, 2006, a series of bomb blasts ripped through seven Western Suburban Railway or Mumbai local train coaches, killing 189 people and injuring 824. The blasts happened around 6:30 pm, during the evening rush hour in the overcrowded trains.

The case was investigated by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the state police.

Apart from the 13 tried, 17 more people were named as wanted in the ATS chargesheet. The accused had included Pakistani nationals.

One of the men sentenced to death by the special court died of Covid-19 in jail in 2021. However, the High Court today acquitted him too.

Special court relied heavily on prosecution’s evidence

Holding that the matter fell into the category of “rarest of the rare case,” special judge Yatin D Shinde had observed that “mitigating circumstances pleaded by the accused are not sufficient to displace the aggravating circumstances”.
The special court heavily relied on confessional statements of the accused and supporting evidence produced by the prosecution.

Many of these have now been rejected by the High Court.

‘Misleading sense of resolution’

“Punishing the actual perpetrator of a crime is a concrete and essential step toward curbing criminal activities, upholding the rule of law, and ensuring the safety and security of citizens. But creating a false appearance of having solved a case by presenting that the accused have been brought to justice gives a misleading sense of resolution. This deceptive closure undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large. Essentially, this is what the case at hand conveys,” a Bench of Justices Anil S Kilor and Shyam C Chandak noted in its 671-page judgement.

Grounds on which HC rejected ATS case

The Bombay HC observed that among the aspects the prosecution failed to establish are the trustworthiness of the witnesses who identified the accused and what kind of explosives were used. It also held that confessional statements of the accused were “not found to be truthful”, and accepted the defence’s claim that the accused were tortured into making the confessions.

The HC also discarded the Test Identification Parade (TIP) of the accused, noting that the Special Executive Officer (SEO) who conducted it did not have the authority to do so.

“Non-trustworthy” evidences of eyewitnesses

The Bench noted that the prosecution examined eight witnesses, including taxi drivers who drove the accused to Churchgate station, the witnesses who saw the accused planting bombs in trains, the witnesses to the assembly of bombs, and the witnesses to the conspiracy.

The HC scrutinised the evidence of each of these witnesses.

About the taxi drivers, it noted that they were silent for over 100 days after the incident, and gave their statement to the police only on November 3, 2006 that two accused had travelled in their taxis. It observed that there was no special reason to trigger the witness’s memory about the face and description of the accused to enable their identification after such a long gap.

The HC raised the point of a long gap also for the witnesses who claimed to have seen the accused planting the bombs in the trains.

The Bench further noted that while one of the witnesses had said that he saw the accused and some more persons making bombs when he entered the house of one of the accused, he changed his version during cross examination, saying he did not enter the house himself, but a friend who accompanied him told him about the bombs.

“Thus, since the defence succeeded in shattering his oral evidence in cross-examination, for this reason and other reasons recorded, we have not considered his evidence worth relying,” the HC noted.

On the version of a person who claimed to be a witness to the conspiracy, the Bench noted that while he said the accused were discussing some issues in secret meetings, he was unaware of the subjects discussed.

On the statement of the witness who helped to draw sketches of the accused, the HC noted that he was not called for the trial and he was not asked to identify the accused in the court.

Evidence about the explosives

On evidence related to recoveries of explosives, including RDX granules, detonators, cookers, circuit boards, hooks, maps, etc, the HC noted that “evidentiary value of these recoveries does not attach any importance on the ground that the prosecution failed to establish and prove the proper custody and proper sealing which ought to be intact till the articles were taken to Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL).”

The judges observed that circuit boards recovered from two accused were of “no help to the prosecution to establish as the prosecution failed to bring any evidence on record and to establish the type of bombs used in the present case.”

Confessional statements “non truthful”

The HC further held the “confessional statements inadmissible” and “not truthful or complete” based on various grounds, including lack of proper approval for the same, variations in correspondence made by officials before or after recording the confessions, and absence of the certificate mandated under MCOCA Rules to establish voluntariness of the confessions.

The Court perused medical evidence of doctors of KEM Hospital and Bhabha Hospital and noted that it “sufficiently hinted at the possibility of torture” being inflicted on the accused to extort a confession.