A special NIA court that acquitted all the accused in the 2007 Samjhauta Express blast case, where 68 people were killed, said in its judgement that the NIA had miserably failed to prove the charges framed against the accused.
Special Court judge Jagdeep Singh said the court had to “conclude this judgment with deep pain and anguish as a dastardly act of violence remained unpunished for want of credible and admissible evidence.”
The court also pulled up the investigating agencies for coining terms like “Muslim terrorism, Hindu fundamentalism etc. or brand an act of criminal(s) as act(s) of particular religion, caste or community.” Several witnesses turned hostile.
‘Gaping holes’
“There are gaping holes in the prosecution evidence and an act of terrorism has remained unsolved. Terrorism has no religion because no religion in the world preaches violence. A Court of Law is not supposed to proceed on popular or predominant public perception or the political discourse of the day and ultimately it has to appreciate the evidence on record,” the court said.
The Samjhauta case has been a matter of a political slugfest between the Congress party and the ruling BJP.
The latter had accused the then UPA government of politicising the case and falsely coining the term “saffron terror.”
Former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) member Naba Kumar Sarkar alias Aseemanand was a prime accused in the case along with other suspects — Lokesh Sharma, Kamal Chauhan and Rajender Chaudhary. All were acquitted last week.
The court said “no concrete oral, documentary or scientific evidence has been brought on record to connect the accused, facing the trial, with the crime in question.”
It added there was not an “iota of evidence” to make out any motive on the part of the accused to indulge in the crime.
No new facts
“The entire prosecution case is found to have been built on inadmissible evidence in the shape of disclosure statements of the accused, without there being any discovery of new fact/recovery of material/object,” the court said.