Mumbai: After pro-hindutva leader Sadhvi Pragya Thakur was granted bail in the 2006 Malegaon bomb blast case by the Bombay High Court last month (25th April), the National Investigating Agency here today has decided to drop all charges against her pertaining to the Malegaon bomb blast.
Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur. File Photo
The National Investigating Agency has reportedly told a special court in Mumbai for the second time in a year that it has no concrete evidence to prosecute her in the case, nearly six persons were killed and 100 other were injured when the two bombs fitted on a motorcycle exploded on 29 September 2008 in Malegaon, around 270 km from Mumbai, said the media reports.
“We have not objected to her discharge plea and in the charge sheet we have already said that there is no prosecutable evidence against her,” reads a quote from the statement of Avinash Rasal, the special NIA prosecutor published by NDTV upon its official website.
Last June, the court had refused to accept the central probe agency’s clean chit for the pro-hindutva leader after an ex-prosecutor accused the NIA of shielding her. Sadhvi Pragya, army Colonel Srikant Purohit and others were arrested for plotting the blasts by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad in 2008. She was reported as being a part of a Pro Hindutva group, Abhinav Bharat and spent the next eight years in jail, notes a report published in an English vernacular.
It was in 2011 that the NIA took over the investigation on the directive of the union home ministry. The Manmohan Singh government wanted a single agency to deal with all pro Hindutva groups related cases to ensure that there were no gaps in the investigation.
Just over a week later, the NIA told the court on Friday that it did not have a problem if Pragya Thakur’s request was accepted.