On May 8, Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Prasad Purohit, who was under investigation by the UPA government for a possible role in the 2008 Malegaon blast, revealed that ATS officers had unlawfully questioned and tortured him to obtain the names of right-wing leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), including Yogi Adityanath.
At the time, Gorakhpur’s MP was Yogi Adityanath, the current chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Under Section 313 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, he made the accusation in a written statement that was submitted to the NIA Special Court (CrPC). According to Lt. Col. Purohit’s 23-page testimony, senior Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) officers tortured him and made him take responsibility for the explosion.
The officer revealed that, despite the ATS not officially recording him as arrested, he was taken into custody on October 29, 2008. He further stated that, despite not being formally detained, the agency had successfully broken the case and named him, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, and other individuals as the accused.
He said that in August 2008, more than a month before the explosion in Malegaon, “all of a sudden, Nationalist Congress Party President Sharad Pawar stated at an Alibaug party worker rally that there are terrorists who are not just Islamic but also Hindu.” The phrase “Hindu terror” was never used before. Immediately after this prophecy, on September 29, 2008, a tragic tragedy occurred.
He insisted that a “fabricated” investigation into the matter was carried out at the behest of the late Hemant Karkare, the head of the Maharashtra ATS, and retired IPS officer Param Bir Singh to “suit the political requirements” of the governing government. He claimed that soon after his detention in Mumbai, he was taken to a secluded home in Khandala, where he was interrogated by the late Hemant Karkare, Param Bir Singh, the joint commissioner of the ATS at the time, and other individuals.
“Karkare and Param Bir Singh were pressuring me repeatedly to divulge the specifics of my intelligence network and a list of my sources and assets who had helped me map the activities of SIMI, ISI, and Dr. Zakir Naik,” he said. Since sharing my source network goes against the fundamental principles of intelligence, I declined to do so. He described in further detail how Colonel PK Shrivastav, his now-retired senior army commander, “stabbed him in the back” before handing him over to the ATS. The first person to hit him while he was in police custody was his supervisor. After that, Param Bir Singh attacked him, and six constables restrained him.
“I was treated with treatment that not even an animal would experience and was treated worse than a prisoner of war of an enemy country,” the Army official emphasised. Karkare, Param Bir Singh, and Col Shrivastav persisted in their demands that I take responsibility for the Malegaon bombing and identify prominent right-wing leaders of the RSS and VHP, including Yogi Adityanath, the Uttar Pradesh lawmaker at the time. This torment went on nonstop till November 3, 2008.
He said that the assault he had received had broken his knee to the point where he was unable even to walk. He went on to say that he had been informed that plans were in place for his “custodial assassination,” which he stated was confirmed. He said that the officials had staged explosions and falsified evidence, including RDX, and he charged them with taking part in the extrajudicial killings of Sandeep Dange, a witness, and Ramchandra Kalsangra, the sought criminal.
Colonel Purohit contended that it was evidently clear that the entire case against him was contrived, as evidenced by the hostile behaviour of the witnesses, who had been threatened, subjected to torture, and occasionally arrested at gunpoint, in order to force them into making false statements by the ATS or their political masters. He said they had compromised national security, irrevocably tarnished the army’s reputation, and demoralised intelligence professionals.
Dawood met the head of the Naxals and desired to arm the terrorists with weapons from the ISI.
He claimed that someone had illegally tapped his phone and that “malafide intentions” were behind the sanctioning of his and other people’s prosecution under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. He described how, in his capacity as an intelligence officer, he began looking into the activities of “fugitive terror accused and ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) agent” Dawood Ibrahim, as well as his interactions with Dr. Ganapati, a well-known member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) central committee, who was officially proclaimed a fugitive.
“Especially after these supplies stopped getting into India from Nepal, the meeting was to streamline the arms, ammunition, war-like stores, and drug supply from ISI, Pakistan, to left-wing extremists and Naxalites in Dandakaranya special committee zone operating in entire peninsular India,” he mentioned. He said that a second of these reports, from 2006–07, concentrated on the money coming from illegal sources and the founder of the Islamic Research Foundation (IRF), Zakir Naik, who is currently at large. Before beginning work on a report, he insisted on thoroughly investigating the growth of Naxalism and left-wing extremism. A few local and national figures, he claimed, were mentioned in the articles.
Col. Purohit stated that the ATS had created a story of “investigation around the individuals whom they always wanted to arrest, probably as directed by their political masters, and the case was built around the targeted individuals who are now accused” after being officially shown to have been arrested on November 5, 2008.
Purohit’s lawyer, Viral Babar, presented the written statement to the special court. The special court has been recording the evidence of all the accused, who are being prosecuted for their purported roles in the explosion. The court has concluded the arguments by Col. Purohit and a few other accused parties in opposition to the prosecution’s evidence.
case of the Malegaon blast
The case relates to what happened on September 29, 2008, at around 9:30 p.m., in Malegaon, a textile town in the sensitive to sectarian feelings Nasik district of North Maharashtra, when a bomb hidden on a motorbike exploded near Hamidia Masjid. Six people lost their lives, and 101 others were injured as a result of the explosion. Before the National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) taking over in 2011, the incident was initially investigated by the Maharashtra Police’s ATS unit. Col. Purohit faced accusations of belonging to Abhinav Bharat, a trust that was founded to protect Hindu principles but was also accused of using him as a front for attacks against Muslims. In this case, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur was also taken into custody.
In August 2017, Lt Col Purohit was eventually granted bail following years of incarceration.
