Additional Sessions Judge M.G. Deshpande on Tuesday acquitted two persons arrested in connection with the 2002 Best Bakery riots case in Vadodara, in which 14 people were killed, for lack of sufficient evidence against them.
The persons acquitted are Mafat Gohil and Harshad Solanki, who were absconding for nearly 11 years before their arrest in 2013, and the second part of the trial against them started in 2019.
The Best Bakery in Vadodara witnessed violent communal riots on March 1, 2002, that claimed 14 lives in retaliation for the clashes in Godhra town three days earlier.
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The Gujarat Police had booked 21 persons on charges of murder, but all the accused were acquitted in 2003.
Soon afterward, one of the victims, Zahirabi Shaikh, along with an NGO moved the Supreme Court against the verdict, urging that the orders and judgments of the trial court and Gujarat High Court should be quashed.
Accepting the plea in 2004, the Supreme Court ordered a re-investigation and retrial and transferred the case to Mumbai to ensure a fair trial.
After the Mumbai trial, retired Bombay High Court Justice Abhay Thipsay (then a Sessions Judge) acquitted eight persons and sentenced nine to life imprisonment in 2006.
Subsequently, in 2012 the Bombay High Court acquitted five and confirmed the life sentence awarded to the four others, relying on the testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the incident.
Though Gohil and Solanki had faced the first trial in the Vadodara court, they had gone absconding during the retrial in Mumbai.
After their arrest, the duo applied for bail claiming they were not aware of the retrial, but their pleas were rejected on the grounds that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute them.
During the trial, their lawyer Prakash Salsingikar vehemently argued against the use of the earlier Mumbai trial’s evidence against them. Two others accused in the case and facing retrial had died during the pendency of the case.
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