Bombay High Court closes case against four accused in 2006 Malegaon blast

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday quashed the order framing charges against four accused in the 2006 Malegaon blast case [Rajendra Chaudhary & Ors. v. Union of India & Ors.].A division bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Shyam Chandak pronounced the order on appeals filed by the accused against a September 2025 order of a special court framing charges against them..The appeal also questioned the manner in which the trial court framed charges and the discharge of several co-accused in the case..The bench found that the National Investigation Agency’s case rested almost entirely on police‑custody disclosure statements, delayed recoveries and a test identification parade conducted six years after the blasts. The court said such material could not lawfully sustain charges. “The disclosure statements of the appellants and other materials collected by the NIA cannot be relied upon to frame charges against them,” the court held. It also remarked that recoveries of incriminating articles six years after the occurrence from a place accessible to general public shall not come within the sweep of the Indian Evidence Act. .The ruling by the High Court today closed the case against accused Rajendra Chaudhary, Dhan Singh, Manohar Ram Singh Narwaria and Lokesh Sharma and brought the trial against them to an end..The bench had earlier condoned a 49‑day delay in filing the appeal, noting that the challenge was a statutory appeal under Section 21 of the National Investigation Agency Act (NIA Act). In the same order of January 2026, the Court had recorded that a prima facie case for interference was made out and had stayed further proceedings before the trial court pending the outcome of the appeal.It allowed the appeal today and discharged all four appellants..The Malegaon case dates back to September 8, 2006, when an offence was registered under provisions of the Indian Penal Code, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and other laws against unknown persons following serial blasts in the powerloom town.The investigation was first conducted by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), which arrested 12 accused and filed a charge sheet in December 2006. The probe was subsequently transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in February 2007, and later taken over by the NIA, which, after further investigation, arrayed the four appellants among other accused and filed a fresh charge sheet..In the High Court, the appellants' counsel made two primary contentions. First, that the NIA failed to produce any eyewitness who actually claimed to have seen the incident; and second, that the discharge of other charge-sheeted accused was patently illegal. The counsel also noted that separate criminal appeals challenging those discharge orders are currently pending..The judges flagged an irreconcilable clash between the original ATS–CBI case, which blamed a set of SIMI‑linked Muslim accused, and the later NIA 'saffron terror' theory based on retracted statements. "The diagonally opposite stories in the charge-sheet filed by the ATS and the NIA lead nowhere," the order states. The court noted that the prosecuting agencies gave two contradictory versions of the incident. "Both stories as floated by the ATS and NIA cannot be reconciled by any stretch of imagination. There seems to be no answer in law as to how the trial Judge can deal with the materials collected by the ATS which implicates another set of accused persons. The case seems to have reached a dead end", the court noted. With this in view, the bench set aside the 30 September 2025 order framing nineteen charges against the four accused.