Bail plea of Malegaon blast accused referred to trial court

The Bombay high court on Thursday referred back to the trial court the bail application filed by Col Prasad Purohit, an accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, and has directed the sessions court to decide it within six weeks.

Col Purohit had filed an appeal challenging a MCOCA court order denying him bail and his lawyer Shrikant Shivde argued before the court that the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act has been removed from the case and there is nothing on record to prove that Purohit was involved in the blasts.

The applicant’s lawyer further argued that except for attending meetings there is nothing to prove the conspiracy charge against Purohit.

Mr Shivde further argued that those meetings which the prosecution is talking about were attended by several persons who were talking about different things and those cannot be termed as conspiracy meetings. Even if it is supposed that those were conspiracy meetings, the applicant furnished reports of those meetings to his superiors immediately after, and accordingly actions were taken, Mr Shivde argued, and questioned how it could be argued that Purohit was part of a conspiracy. Col Purohit has also sought those reports from the Army to prove he was reporting regularly about what was happening in the meetings.

It was also argued that in a sensitive matter like the 1993 serial Mumbai bomb blasts, the court had granted bail to several accused because they had already spent more than half the period of minimum expected sentence they would have got if they had been proven guilty.

Mr Shivde argued that Col Purohit has already spent around seven years behind bars and he is not facing any charge for which he could be sentenced to death and hence he should be granted bail. A division bench of Justice Naresh H. Patil and Justice Prakash Deu Naik held that since there is a change in circumstance the applicant should go back to the trial court seeking bail.