‘Barbaric and inhuman torture’: Why Bombay HC acquitted all 12 convicted in 2006 Mumbai train blasts

“Punishing the actual perpetrator of a crime is a concrete and essential step… But creating a false appearance of having solved a case… undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large. Essentially, this is what the case at hand conveys.”

With this powerful observation, the Bombay High Court on Monday acquitted all 12 Muslim men convicted in the 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts case. The July 11, 2006, terror attack had killed 187 people and injured 824. The High Court overturned a 2015 decision by special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act court judge Yatin D Shinde that had sentenced five of the men to death and seven to life imprisonment.

The High Court delivered a scathing indictment of the prosecution's case. It concluded that the evidence presented by the Mumbai Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad was unreliable. The court found that the entire case was built on three pillars: eyewitness accounts, recoveries of explosives and confessional statements. It held that all of them had crumbled under legal scrutiny.

The statements were obtained through “barbaric and inhuman“ torture, the eyewitness accounts were unreliable and the evidence recovered was “vulnerable to tampering” and therefore inadmissible.

The judgment, delivered by Justices Anil S Kilor and...

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