Ahmedabad: Sessions Court Judge AR Patel today delivered the verdict in the 2008 serial bomb blast case in Ahmadabad. The court convicted 49 of the 77 accused and acquitted 28. The trial court had fixed February 1 as the date of the verdict, but the case was adjourned to February 8 after the judge was infected with corona and went into home isolation.

Legal proceedings began in 2009 and the statements of 1,163 witnesses were recorded. 6,000 documentary pieces of evidence were presented. A total of 547 charge sheets of 3,47,800 pages were filed. After 13 years, the arguments of both sides were completed before the 77 accused. 7 judges were changed, even in the Corona period, the daily hearing went on, 3 accused had fled to Pakistan and 1 accused had fled to Syria. The case dates back to July 26, 2008, when 21 bomb blasts took place in the Ahmedabad municipality area within 70 minutes. This serial blast shook the whole country. In this incident, 56 people lost their lives and more than 200 people were injured. Never before have so many blasts taken place in the country in such a short time. After this attack, the then Gujarat CM Narendra Modi had ordered the immediate arrest of all the terrorists.

A few days after the serial blasts in Ahmedabad, the police had recovered a large number of bombs from several areas of Surat. This was followed by 20 FIRs in Ahmedabad and 15 in Surat. The case against the 77 accused began in December 2009 after the court clubbed all the 35 FIRs together. The police investigation claimed that they were part of the same conspiracy. The police had claimed that terrorists linked to the Indian mujahideen had carried out the serial blast to avenge the 2002 Gujarat riots. When the case was going on, some prisoners allegedly tried to escape in 2013 by digging a 213-feet-long tunnel in the jail. The trial for this jailbreak attempt is still under consideration.

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