New Delhi: Former IPS officer Vikash Narain Rai, who had cracked the Samjhauta Expres blast case on Wednesday questioned the NIA’s “complicity” and said the prosecuting agency should be “held accountable on how these acquittals took place”.
Rai, a 1977-batch IPS and former Director General (DG) of Law and Order, Haryana Police. whose team traced the bag used in the blasts to a market in Indore, said the acquittals were “bound to happen, as the entire prosecution was trying to bury the case”.
Rai also questioned NIA’s handling of probe into similar cases such as the 2007 Ajmer shrine, Mecca Masjid, and Malegaon blasts.
“All these cases are interlinked, done by the same group of people,” he said while talking to The Indian Express on phone.
Rai's comments came soon after Special NIA Court acquitted Swami Aseemanand and three others in the Samjhauta Express blast case that left 68 people, mostly Pakistanis, dead in 2007.
Swami Aseemanand hit the media headlines in 2011 when he confessed before the court about the role he and other Hindutva terrorists played in 2006 Malegaon and Samjhauta Express blasts. The Special NIA Court in Panchkula, Haryana however said the inevstigating agency could not establish the charges against the accused.
The Samjhauta Express, also called Attari Express, is a bi-weekly train that runs on Wednesdays and Sundays – between Delhi and Attari in India and Lahore in Pakistan. The blast in the train took place near Panipat in Haryana on February 18, 2007.
“It is the agency (NIA) which is responsible for prosecution. The case has gone for years. There has been no change in the stand of the investigating agency. They (NIA) still maintain that those (arrested and charged) are accused and the NIA has not changed their line of investigations even after the government changed and (the agency’s) director-general changed", Rai said.
Rai also recalled how Rohini Salian, a public prosecutor in Malegaon blast case, had given a statement, saying she was being pressured by the NIA to go soft in the cases in which Hindu terror accused were arrested.
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