Was on Army duty to join conspirators: Malegaon blast accused Lt. Col Purohit tells HC
Mumbai: Malegaon bomb blast case accused Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit on Wednesday told the Bombay High Court, through his lawyer, that he was collecting intelligence for the Indian Army as part of his duty by attending conspiracy meetings for the 2008 blast.
The high court was hearing Purohit's application seeking that all charges against him in the case be dropped.
Six people were killed and 100 others injured when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon city in the Nashik district of Maharashtra on September 29, 2008.
Neela Gokhale, the counsel for Purohit, who has been booked under anti-terror laws by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), told a bench of Justices SS Shinde and MS Karnik that he had been meeting conspirators and attending secret meetings in a bid to gather information and pass it on to the Army.
Gokhale submitted that Purohit was merely discharging his duties, and therefore, the NIA should have obtained a prior sanction of the Central government to prosecute him.
She said section 197(2) of the CrPC (Criminal Procedure Code) barred a court from the cognizance of any offense that had been committed by any member of the Armed Forces while acting in the discharge of his or her duties without the previous sanction of the Central government.
Gokhale cited "documents from the Indian Army, and former Mumbai joint commissioner of Mumbai Police, Himanshu Roy, commending Purohit for the inputs and information he had allegedly shared with them over the years".
"I (Prasad Shrikant Purohit) am pointing out from these documents that I was discharging my duty, infiltrating in the groups and reporting to my superiors for protecting national security," Gokhale said.
"And for this work, they put me in jail, tortured me, and branded me a terrorist," the counsel said.
In September last year, Purohit had filed a plea in the HC seeking that all charges in the case against him be quashed.
He submitted that the NIA, the prosecuting agency in the case, did not seek prior sanction under the Criminal Procedure Code to prosecute him, therefore, the courts couldn't have taken cognizance of the charges against him.
The NIA, however, opposed Purohit's plea.
In an affidavit filed in the high court in September last year, the NIA had said that in attending the conspiracy meetings, Purohit was not working for the Army and therefore, no sanction under 197 of the CrPc was required for his prosecution.
Purohit was arrested in the case in 2009.
According to the NIA, the motorcycle used in the blast belonged to Purohit's co-accused and BJP MP Pragya Thakur.
The HC will continue hearing the arguments in the case on February 2.
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Iran's president, foreign minister and others found dead at helicopter crash site, state media says
Dubai (AP): Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country's foreign minister and others have been found dead at the site of a helicopter crash Monday after an hourslong search through a foggy, mountainous region of the country's northwest, state media reported. Raisi was 63.
The crash comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by the Israel-Hamas war, during which Raisi under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel just last month.
State TV gave no immediate cause for the crash in Iran's East Azerbaijan province. Among the dead was Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, 60.
With Raisi were Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran's East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.
Early Monday morning, Turkish authorities released what they described as drone footage showing what appeared to be a fire in the wilderness that they “suspected to be wreckage of helicopter.”
The coordinates listed in the footage put the fire some 20 kilometres south of the Azerbaijan-Iranian border on the side of a steep mountain.
Footage released by the IRNA early Monday showed what the agency described as the crash site, across a steep valley in a green mountain range. Soldiers speaking in the local Azeri language said: “There it is, we found it.”
