New Delhi: The Supreme Court Thursday stayed the Bombay High Court verdict acquitting all 12 accused in the 2006 Mumbai train bomb blasts case.
A bench of Justices M M Sundresh and N Kotiswar Singh issued notice to all the accused in the case and sought their response on the appeal filed by the state government.
The top court said the high court judgment shall not be treated as a precedent.
On Monday, a special high court bench of Justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak acquitted all the 12 accused, saying the prosecution utterly failed to prove the case and it was “hard to believe the accused committed the crime”.
Of the 12, five had been sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment by the special court. One of the death row convicts died in 2021.
More than 180 people were killed when seven blasts ripped through Mumbai local trains at various locations on the western line July 11, 2006.
The high court allowed the appeals filed by the accused challenging their conviction and sentences imposed on them by a special court in 2015.
The high court verdict came as a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra ATS which probed the case. The agency claimed that the accused were members of the banned outfit Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and hatched the conspiracy with Pakistani members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
