Failure of govt, probe; culprits must be punished: 7/11 survivors on HC ruling

As the Bombay High Court acquitted all 12 accused in the 7/11 Mumbai train bomb blasts case, survivors of the horrific 2006 terror attack called the ruling a "collective failure" of the government and investigation team, and asserted that the perpetrators must be punished at any cost.

They said the Maharashtra government should move the Supreme Court and challenge the acquittal, a step already taken by the state administration.

In a video interview to PTI hours after the HC verdict on Monday, Chirag Chauhan (40), a chartered accountant and one of the survivors of the 2006 bombings, described the acquittal ruling as a "collective failure of the government, investigation team and judicial team".

"I think the state government should go to the Supreme Court and demand fair justice or investigation. Those responsible (for the serial blasts) should be punished," he insisted.

As a 21-year-old chartered accountancy student, Chauhan was travelling on a local train on the Western Railway when it was rocked by a powerful blast between Khar and Santacruz stations on 11 July 2006. He was paralysed owing to the spinal cord injury suffered in the terror attack, and is now wheelchair-bound.

Another survivor Mahendra Pitale (52), a Western Railway employee, affirmed that the government should explore all available legal options to ensure justice in the 19-year-old case. The survivor maintained that he does not agree with the HC ruling and was also disappointed that the verdict came 19 years after the bombings.

Pitale, who was 33 when he lost his left hand in a blast in Jogeshwari, called for bringing to justice all those who plotted and carried out the bomb blasts on the Western Railway's suburban network, which killed more than 180 people and left several others injured.

"I want the government to appoint a committee (to handle post-ruling matters) and appeal in the apex court. The accused should be punished as early as possible," Pitale insisted.

HC verdict on 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts shocking: legal experts

Hansraj Kanojia, another survivor of the terror attack, said he was very upset with the HC verdict and asserted that the real culprits should be tried and handed severe punishment. Kanojia, who lost his right leg in the tragedy, said he was travelling in a general compartment of a suburban train when an explosion ripped through an adjacent first class coach at Jogeshwari.

A total of seven blasts ripped through Mumbai's busy suburban trains during the evening rush hour on that July day, but the HC acquitted all 12 accused, saying the prosecution “utterly failed” to prove the case and it was "hard to believe the accused committed the crime".

Of the 12, five had been sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment by a special court. One of the death row convicts died in 2021.

Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court said it would hear on 24 July the Maharashtra government's plea against the HC verdict. A bench of Chief Justice B.R. Gavai and Justices K. Vinod Chandran and N.V. Anjaria on Tuesday took note of the urgent mentioning of the state’s appeal against the HC's 21 July verdict by solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, and said it would be listed for Thursday.

The HC verdict came as a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra ATS which probed the case. The agency claimed that the accused were members of the banned outfit Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and hatched the conspiracy with Pakistani members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

In its damning indictment of the prosecution's case, the high court declared all confessional statements of the accused as inadmissible and suggested "copying”.

Further eroding the credibility of the confessions, the court said the accused had established that torture was inflicted upon them to extort these confessional statements.