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MCOCA sustained against accused of Malegaon blast
A special court on Thursday sustained the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) charges against all the 11 accused of the Malegaon blast case.
The decision came after two days of marathon arguments with Special MCOCA Judge Y D Shinde who maintained the chargesheet filed by Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) on all accused under MCOCA.
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In its ruling, Shinde held that the evidence submitted by the ATS were sufficient to invoke the provisions of MCOCA against the accused.
The voluminous chargesheet comprises more than 4,250 pages and has statements of more than 450 witnesses.
Ganesh Sovani, one of the defence lawyers, told IANS that they would challenge the ruling before the Bombay High Court within a fortnight after receiving a certified copy of the order. Sovani said that invoking of stringent MCOCA against the accused was flawed and some of the points raised by the prosecution were afterthought.
The ATS had filed the chargesheet on Tuesday against the 11 accused, namely, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Lt. Col. Prasad S. Purohit, Rakesh Dhawade, Swami Amritanand alias Dayanand Pandey, former armyman Ramesh Upadhyay, Jagdish Mhatre, Ajay Rahirkar, Shyamlal Bhanwarlal Sahu, Shivnarain Singh Kalsangra, Samir Kulkarni and Sudhakar Chaturvedi.
Among them, Sadhvi Pragya, Purohit, Rahirkar, Kalsangra and Sahu, whose police custody ended last Tuesday, had filed petitions for bail, which will be heard on Jan 30.
The chargesheet was filed by the former ATS chief Hemant Karkare, who had been directing the probe into the case and had reached on some breathtaking consequences. He was on the razor’s edge for indicting against self-styled Hindu religious leaders, a serving army officer and a retired army officer, and activists of a Hindu radical organization.
The court slapped the accused with MCOCA on November 21, just five days before Karkare’s death in the Mumbai terror attacks.
On Sep 29, 2008 a bomb planted on a scooter exploded in the busy market area of Malegaon (Maharashtra) packed with Muslims, killing six and injuring 10 others.