Malegaon:
After spending half a decade in prison, seven of the nine accused in the 2006 Malegaon blasts walked out of jail in Mumbai today.
The men are expected to head home to Malegaon, in Maharashtra. Residents there have been on a relay hunger strike for over 200 days, demanding their release. A public felicitation has also been planned.
All nine accused were granted bail on November 5 after the National Investigation Agency (NIA) told a special court that it wouldn't oppose their plea. But two of them, Mohammed Ali and Asif Khan, will continue to remain in jail as they are also charged with involvement in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case.
The nine men were arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) in 2006 and charged with orchestrating a bomb attack in Malegaon that killed 31 people. They were booked under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) that denied them bail for five years.
The accused - Noor ul Huda Shamshudioha Ansari, Shabbir Ahmed Masiullah, Raees Ahmed, Dr Salman Farsi, Dr Farukh Maghdumi, Mohammed Ali, Mohammed Zahid, Asif Bashir Khan and Abrar Ahmed Saeed - were alleged to be members of the banned organisation Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
They were granted bail only after the NIA reviewed evidence following RSS man Swami Aseemanand's confession in January this year, which pointed to the involvement of right-wing groups in the Malegaon blasts. The case was then re-investigated, though the Swami later retracted his confession in March.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitted a report to the NIA stating that the nine men arrested were innocent and that only members of the right-wing group arrested last year should be probed for the blasts. The special MCOCA court, hearing the case, finally granted them bail earlier this month. However, the final report in the case by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) is yet to be filed.
Now, as they leave jail, their families and friends ask why they were denied bail for so many years. Thrown into the darkness of prison cells, the lives of these men changed forever. One of them was Dr Maqdumi. The 33-year-old doctor's children were too young to even understand what was going on when their father was picked up by the police.
"For the last 4-5 years, we have gone through a lot of trouble as we constantly heard about the torture these men went through inside the jail. The people of our village knew the truth and so they helped us cope with it," Dr Maqdumi's father said as he narrated the horror.
Another accused, Dr Salman Farsi, an allopathy doctor, was 35 when he was arrested. A father of three children, Dr Farsi's family says it was repeatedly humiliated by neighbours.
"We hope that justice is done to all others who are innocent and are spending their lives in jail. We can understand the plight of their families," said Nafisa Ansari, Dr Farsi's wife.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said recently said that it was "important to convict the real culprits behind the 2006 Malegaon blasts." That, though, may not console Nafisa, who, along with her husband, lost five years of life together and much more.