AHMEDABAD: When court gave them chargesheets, they made dumbbells out of them for body-building, as per revelations of a jailor last week before the special court.
A senior jailor at Sabarmati Central Jail, Dinu Prajapati, told the court how accused persons in the 2008 serial blasts case were using their bulky chargesheets as dumbbells for workout inside the jail.
Prajapati was brought to the witness box by the accused persons and was cross-examined by government lawyers. In a reply to a question by the prosecution, Prajapati said it was true that the serial blasts accused had made dumbbells out of the chargesheet papers. These were recovered by the jail authorities.
Prajapati could not elaborate on this aspect as his questioning was cut short after defence advocates objected stating that this had no relevance to the case and was an effort by the state government to slander the accused persons in order to prejudice the court.
Special judge A R Patel made this remark about the objection in Prajapati’s deposition draft.
Sources say that the chargesheet papers against each accused runs into thousands of pages as there are multiple cases registered against each accused.
Chargesheet has thousands of pages
There were 20 FIRs filed in Ahmedabad for 19 explosions and the one bomb that did not go off. Similarly, police lodged 15 FIRs in Surat in this case. Each of the arrested accused was booked in all 35 cases and was served with voluminous charge sheets in each of the cases, causing case papers to pile up, sources said.
Many of the serial blasts accused have chequered histories of imprisonment in Sabarmati jail. Twenty-four of them were even charged for an attempt to break out of the prison by digging a tunnel in 2013. This incident led to various restrictions being placed on these inmates. One of them had to approach the court to get an access to books for his studies. This was because the investigation revealed that they had learned how to dig a tunnel by going through engineering books from the prison library.
There are 78 persons facing the trial in this case. Fifty-six persons were killed in the terror strike on July 26, 2008, and 200 suffered injuries. Little known terror outfit, Indian Mujahideen, had claimed responsibility for the attack after which it was banned in 2010.