A girl holding candle light pays tributes to the persons who lost their lives in twin blasts. | Photo Credit: File photo
The victims and their families of Hyderabad twin blasts of 2007 expressed unhappiness following the verdict given by the Special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court which awarded 10-year-jail to four Indian Mujahideen accused in the case.
The Special Court had earlier framed charges against the four, along with seven others, on March 31, 2023. The other seven have been identified as Yasin Bhatkal, Asadullah Akhtar, Zia-Ur-Rehman, Tehsin Akhter and Hyder Ali.
The NIA, in an official release on Thursday morning, said that their Special Court in New Delhi had sentenced four persons to 10 years of imprisonment in the Indian Mujahideen (IM) conspiracy case relating to the plot hatched by Pakistan-backed terrorists to trigger bomb blasts across the country.
“The accused, identified as Danish Ansari (Darbhanga, Bihar) Aftab Alam (Purnea, Bihar), Imran Khan (Nanded, Maharashtra) and Obaid-Ur-Rehman (Hyderabad), were convicted on July 7, 2023, under UA(P) Act in the NIA case. They had been arrested between January and March 2013. Under the sentence pronounced on Wednesday, the Special Judge also imposed a fine of ₹2,000 on accused Danish Ansari and ₹10,000 on Aftab Alam,” said the release.
The four accused were in close association with IM members, including Pakistan-based key accused Riyaz Bhatkal and Yasin Bhatkal, based in India. They had done recce of important places, including Hyderabad and Delhi, and procured explosives.
NIA officials said that the case pertains to the conspiracy hatched by the members of the Indian Mujahideen, which is responsible for carrying out various blasts in the country, including Varanasi blasts of March 2006, Mumbai serial blasts of July 2006, UP courts serial blasts at Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow in November 2007, Hyderabad twin blasts of August 2007, besides the Jaipur serial blasts, Delhi serial blasts and Ahmedabad serial blasts in 2008. IM was also behind the Chinnaswamy, Bengaluru Stadium blast of 2010, and the Hyderabad twin blasts of 2013.
Expressing his displeasure with the verdict, Bade Anjaiah, who lost his 14-year-old daughter and two more family members in the Gokul Chat blast, said that the main conspirators should get much stricter punishment.
“Those involved in the blast were sentenced to death but the ones who were involved in planning so many blasts cannot get away with 10 years of jail time. It is pointless to even accommodate and spend so much revenue on these men for so many years. They should be hanged and eliminated. While lakhs are being spent on them, the victims were given ₹5 lakh per family as compensation, while these men were fed on taxpayers dime,” said Mr. Anjaiah.
In 2018, Anique Shafiq Syed and Akbar Ismail Choudhary, the alleged Indian Mujahideen (IM) operatives, were sentenced to death by the NIA’s Special Court, while third convict Tariq Anjum was awarded life sentence.
Syed Raheem, who lost an eye in the Gokul Chat blast when he went to pick up ice-cream for his daughter, said that the men should be punished to endure the similar pain the survivors are living with.
“For almost 15 years, the survivors have suffered with ailments and misery because of these men. They will again spend lakhs on them in the jail. Why even bother incarcerating them for that long like it will do some good? This is not fair to the survivors,” he said.
Two powerful explosions had ripped through a popular eatery Gokul Chat and an open-air theatre at Lumbini Park, near State Secretariat, in Hyderabad on August 25, 2007, killing 42 people and wounding 68. While 32 people were killed at Gokul Chat, 10 others lost their lives at Lumbini Park, in near-simultaneous blasts around 7.45 p.m. that day. An unexploded bomb was also recovered under a foot-over-bridge at Dilsukhnagar that night.
