Mumbai: The special court hearing the 2008 Malegaon blast case trial here on Thursday instructed the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to assess whether the testimony of a witness would be relevant before summoning him or her for deposition.
The NIA court’s direction followed a plea of BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur, a prime accused in the case, which claimed that the prosecution was dragging on the trial.
The court has so far examined 295 witnesses, of which around 30 have turned hostile (refused to support the prosecution’s case.)
Thakur claimed that the NIA was calling witnesses who were “not relevant to the accused”.
Her lawyer J P Mishra cited multiple instances when the NIA summoned “irrelevant witnesses” and later furnished WhatsApp messages or emails about their unavailability on the day they were supposed to appear.
The NIA said in its reply to the plea that witnesses cannot be dropped because they are not relevant to the accused.
It also denied that it was trying to prolong the trial.
Special judge for NIA cases, A K Lahoti, partly allowed Thakur’s plea and directed that the prosecution should conduct an assessment about the relevancy of a witness to save time.
The prosecution is not bound to examine all the witnesses it has cited, the court added.
Six persons were killed and 90 injured when an explosive device strapped to a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon, a communally sensitive town in north Maharashta, on September 29, 2008.
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