Balance of justice

Challenge for Gehlot to bring justice to terror victims

- NAMRATA BIJI AHUJA

NATWAR GOPAL MALPANI, 76, still remembers the horror of the Jaipur serial blasts in 2008. He and his wife, Bhagwati Devi, 54, had just become grandparents. Bhagwati was shopping at Johri Bazaar when the explosions happened, abruptly ending the new chapter in her life.

“A shrapnel hit her head and she fell; she writhed in pain for 45 minutes. I will get justice only when the perpetrators are meted out the same treatment for killing innocents,” said Malpani, who runs an import-export business.

He had one question for the police, courts and politicians: “Why do we give the terror-accused a long rope, allowing them to take advantage of the system and the loopholes in the investigation?”

Malpani wants the real perpetrators to face the noose. “If the four accused are not the actual culprits, then the police should tell us who carried out the terror attacks,” he said.

On March 30, the Rajasthan High Court acquitted all four accused in the 2008 Jaipur blasts case, pointing at “systemic failure” leading to “inadmissible evidence”, “ignoring material contradictions’’, and “not properly considering the legal provisions in the Indian Evidence Act, Information Technology Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure” to prove beyond reasonable doubt the involvement of the four terror accused in the dastardly terror attack that killed 71 people.

The trial court had earlier convicted the accused and sentenced them to death. Last February, they were also sentenced to death by a trial court in the 2008 Ahmedabad blasts case.