MUMBAI – An Indian court on Tuesday charged Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and five others under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in a case pertaining to 2008 Malegaon bomb blast.
Under the Act, the accused were charged with being part of a terrorist act, and under IPC they have been charged with criminal conspiracy and murder.
Judge Vinod Padalkar, presiding over the special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court, framed charges against the accused persons.
Apart from Lt Col Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya, the other accused in Malegaon blast case are Major (r) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sameer Kulkarni.
All the accused were present in the court when the judge read out the charges against them.
Six people were killed and over 100 injured when an explosive device strapped on a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon, a town about 200 km from Mumbai in north Maharashtra with a majority of Muslims, on September 29, 2008.
Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit is the same Army officer is a co-conspirator of the Samjhauta Blasts in which 70 Pakistanis were killed. He was given a clean chit for that and was reinstated in the Indian Army recently.
