Malegaon blast: Supreme Court seeks NIA reply on bail plea

The Supreme Court (SC) on Friday issued a notice to the premier counter-terror agency, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and the state of Maharashtra on a bail plea made by 2008 Malegaon blast prime accused Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit.

The bench, comprising of justices RK Agrawal and AM Sapre, has given them two weeks to file a reply. Senior advocate Gopal Subramaniam said his client, Purohit, was considered to be one of the best counter-insurgency officers and that he was framed.

On April 28, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, the prime accused in the 2008 Malegaon blast, moved the top court, barely days after the Bombay High Court rejected his bail application on April 25.

The HC had denied Purohit bail while granting bail to Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur for the lack of "incriminating or objectionable material" against her. Purohit and Thakur were arrested in 2008 on conspiracy charges pertaining to the 2008 Malegaon (Maharashtra) blast. In his petition, Purohit claims that he is an upright intelligence officer who successfully infiltrated SIMI and ISI to extract information. According to Purohit, "It is a specific case of the Petitioner that his presence in some meetings, alleged to be a conspiracy, has been reported by him to his superiors and was in the course of gathering intelligence." He added, "that most of the co-accused were registered sources of the Army and part of the information intelligence network developed by the Petitioner."