Special judge M G Deshpande accepted defence lawyer Prakash Salsingikar’s arguments that the prosecution had failed to attribute any specific role to Harshad Solanki and Mafat Gohil and none of the witnesses had identified them to be part of the mob.
A court order is likely to become available within the next two days.
According to the prosecution, the attack on the bakery was a fallout of the Godhra carnage on February 27, 2002, when a mob set on fire a bogie of Sabarmati Express, by which ‘Karsevaks’ were returning from Ayodhya, killing 56 people and injuring 46 others.
The incident triggered communal riots across Gujarat. On March 1, 2002, around 1,000 people attacked Best Bakery, located in Vadodara’s Hanuman Tekri, looted bakery items, and set the ground-plus one building that housed the shop and served as a residence for the owner’s family and employees on fire, the prosecution said.
The attackers drew the family of the bakery owner, Habibulla Shaikh, and employees out on the promise of letting them off with minor beatings, but killed at least 14 of them, including women and children, the prosecution pointed out.
On June 27, 2003, a Vadodara court acquitted all the 21 accused after the witnesses turned hostile. Some of the witnesses later told the media that they were under severe pressure to not support the prosecution case.
Taking cognisance of the matter, the National Human Rights Commission filed a petition before the Supreme Court and the apex court in April 2004 ordered a retrial in several riot cases, including the Best Bakery case. The SC requested the Bombay high court to allot the case to a sessions court in Maharashtra and accordingly, the accused were again tried in Mumbai.
In the first phase of the trial, the Mumbai sessions court on February 27, 2006, convicted nine of them and sentenced them to life imprisonment while eight others were acquitted for want of evidence. On July 9, 2012, the Bombay high court reversed conviction of five of the nine and acquitted them.
Four accused – Harshad Solanki, Mafat Gohil, Jayanti Gohil and Ramesh Gohil – were arrested in 2015 in connection with the Ajmer bomb blast case. In March 2017, they were brought to Mumbai to face the second set of the Best Bakery trial after they were acquitted in the Ajmer case.
Jayanti Gohil and Ramesh Gohil died during pendency of the trial. Against the other two, the prosecution examined 10 witnesses and cited some evidence adduced in the first set of the trial.
In their defence, the two accused claimed that the attack was the result of the bakery owner’s disputes with some locals . Members of a particular community carried out the attack, and they were completely unconnected with the incident, their counsel said. They also claimed that activist Teesta Setalvad had influenced the probe and tutored witnesses.
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