Mumbai, Jul 21 (PTI) Chirag Chauhan, a 2006 Mumbai train blasts survivor who is now wheelchair-bound and a practising CA, expressed dismay over the acquittal of all the 12 accused in the case by the Bombay High Court on Monday, and said “Justice got killed”.
Hours after the acquittal ruling, Chauhan (40) took to social media platform X to express his deep disappointment over the verdict and maintained “the law of the land failed today”.
Nineteen years after seven blasts on suburban trains in Mumbai killed more than 180 persons and injured several other, a special HC bench of Justices Anil Kilor and Shyam Chandak acquitted all the 12 accused, saying the prosecution “utterly failed” to prove the case and it was “hard to believe the accused committed the crime”.
“Today is a very sad day for everyone! Justice got killed!! No one got punished for the irreparable damage and pain suffered by thousands of families!!,” Chauhan said in a post on X.
Highlighting that he has forgiven the terrorists responsible for the blasts and moved on with his life, the chartered accountant (CA), however, noted justice could have been served in the case had Narendra Modi been Prime Minister then.
“I wish we had Shri Narendra Modi at the time as our PM, we could have got justice like in the recent terror attack (an apparent reference to Pahalgam carnage). Bharat went inside Pakistan and gave a befitting reply to terrorists & all perpetrators!” he stated in an oblique refence to ‘Operation Sindoor’ conducted by armed forces in May.
As a 21-year-old chartered accountancy student, Chauhan was travelling on a local train on the Western Railway when it was rocked by a powerful bomb blast between Khar and Santacruz stations on July 11, 2006.
He was paralysed due to spinal cord injury suffered in the terror attack and is now uses a wheelchair.
On the 19th anniversary of the blasts on July 11, 2025, Chauhan had written a long post on the social media platform in which he had elaborated how his life changed forever after the injury he suffered in the terror attack.
“I cleared the CA final in 2009, just three years after the blasts. Initially I could only sit for a few hours, but after physiotherapy I managed to sit for 8 hrs, then 12 hrs, and now I can sit for 16 hrs,” he had written in the post.
The HC judgement comes as a major embarrassment to the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) which probed the case. The agency had claimed that the accused were members of the banned outfit Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and had hatched the conspiracy with Pakistani members of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
In a damning indictment of the prosecution’s case, the high court declared all confessional statements of the accused as inadmissible suggesting “copying”.
Further eroding the credibility of the confessions, the court said the accused had successfully established that torture was inflicted upon them to extort these confessional statements.
The bench noted the prosecution has failed to even bring on record the type of bombs used in the crime and that the evidence relied on by it was not conclusive to convict the accused. PTI KK RSY
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