The Allahabad High Court has acquitted Mohammad Ilyas, who was serving a life sentence in the 1996 Modinagar-Ghaziabad bus blast case, citing a lack of admissible evidence.
The law cannot treat a confession made to the police as independent evidence.
A division bench of Justices Siddharth and Ram Manohar Narayan Mishra delivered the verdict with “a heavy heart,” observing that the prosecution failed to prove Ilyas’s role in the incident.
Section 25 of the Evidence Act bars the confessional statement recorded by the police, and the bench, therefore, cannot accept it.
The judges held that no legally valid evidence remained against the appellant and ordered his acquittal.
The 1996 explosion in a moving bus killed 18 passengers and injured nearly 48 others.
According to the FIR, a Roorkee depot bus left Delhi at 3:55 PM on April 27, 1996, carrying about 53 passengers.
Fourteen more boarded at Mohannagar. Around 5 PM, a powerful explosion occurred in the front section of the bus.
Ten people died instantly, and dozens suffered injuries. Forensic tests detected RDX beneath the driver’s seat, and investigators confirmed the blast was triggered by remote control.
The prosecution alleged that Pakistani national Abdul Mateen, alias Iqbal, said to be a district commander of Harkat-ul-Ansar, orchestrated the attack along with Mohammad Ilyas and Tasleem.
Militants in Jammu and Kashmir radicalised Ilyas, who is originally from Muzaffarpur and lives in Ludhiana.
In 2013, the trial court acquitted Tasleem but sentenced Ilyas and Mateen to life imprisonment for multiple offences. The government did not appeal Tasleem’s acquittal.
The High Court observed that none of the 34 prosecution witnesses could identify the person who planted the explosives because the bus left Delhi before someone placed the bomb.
The bench also rejected the argument that the confession was admissible under Section 15 of the TADA Act, noting that TADA was not in force at the time of the blast.
The cassette allegedly containing Ilyas’s confession was also never produced in evidence.
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