Mecca Masjid blast: NIA court acquits Aseemanand, 4 others

HYDERABAD: A special court in Hyderabad on Monday acquitted for lack of evidence five men, including current and former members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who were accused of being involved in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast that claimed the lives of nine people.

Indicted by India’s federal counter-terror bureau National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2013, the men were accused of having plotted the attack as part of a Hindu extremist conspiracy, an allegation that immediately pitted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against the then ruling Congress.

Among them was Swami Aseemanand, who has been named in several other cases with a similar motive.

The 2007 attack took place during Friday prayers in the mosque adjacent to the historic Charminar in Hyderabad on May 18, killing nine people and leaving 58 injured.

Five others were killed in police firing in the violence that followed immediately after the blast.

In addition to Aseemanand, the men acquitted are: RSS pracharak from Rajasthan Devendra Gupta, property dealercum-RSS activist from Madhya Pradesh Lokesh Sharma, Gujarat’s Bharat Mohanlal Ratesh war and a farmer from Madhya Pradesh, Rajender Chowdary.

“The judge observed that the prosecution could prove not a single allegation levelled by the agency, and hence he acquitted all the accused ,” said defence lawyer B Rajvardhan Reddy at the Nampally criminal courts complex.

The Mecca Masjid blast was among six alleged terrorist attacks believed to have been carried out by suspected Hindu extremists.

During the trial, the special court examined 226 witnesses of whom 66 turned hostile. NIA exhibited as many as 411 documents during the trial.

Shortly after the verdict, the Bharatiya Janata Party hit out the Congress, which was in power at the Centre when the Mecca Masjid blast took place, and accused it of “defaming” the Hindu religion by coining the term “saffron terror”.

“Today, after the verdict, the Congress’ face has been exposed as never before,” BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad questioned the NIA investigation. “It (acquittal) is happening in each case since the government was formed four years ago.. .people are losing faith in the agencies,” he told news channels.

Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi accused NIA of deliberately failing to produce evidence against the accused. Owaisi said many witnesses turned hostile after 2014, when the BJP came to power at the Centre.The trial against three other accused in the Mecca Masjid blast is still pending since two of them are still absconding and their names were not included in the first charge-sheet. Another accused, Sunil Joshi, was murdered in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas on December 9, 2007 and hence the case against him was dropped, the lawyer added. The state government in June 2007 transferred the case to Central Bureau of Investigation, which later handed over the case to NIA in 2011. Initially, the Hyderabad police which investigated the case suspected it to be the handiwork of Harkat-ul-Jihade-Islami (HuJI), a fundamentalist group supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The police picked up more than 90 men – unofficial figures put it at more than 200 – for interrogation. Eventually, 21 were charged.