Mumbai:
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has taken custody of Lieutenant Colonel Purohit, Major Upadhyay and Dayanand Pandey, accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast case, till July 30.
Purohit is the first serving Indian army officer accused of playing a major role in planning and executing a terror blast.
Earlier, in January 2009, the Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) filed a chargesheet with 4,500-plus pages in the case before the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court in Mumbai.
It named 11 accused, including Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, self-proclaimed Shankaracharya Dayanand Pandey alias Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sameer Kulkarni, Rakesh Dhavade and others. It name two accused - Ramji Kalsangra and Sandeep Dange - as absconders.
According to the chargesheet, it was Pandey who had instructed Colonel Purohit to arrange for the RDX used in the blast.
Purohit had come in contact with Major Upadhyay when he was posted at Nashik in the Army's liaison unit.
Seven people were killed in a bomb blast on September 29, 2008, at Malegaon, a communally-sensitive textile town in Nasik district Maharashtra. The probe into the blast had brought into focus some right-wing Hindu groups.