The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team inquiring into the Naroda Gam massacre of 2002 told a special court in Ahmedabad that former minister Maya Kodnani, who is the main accused in the case, was present at the spot of the riots for around 10 minutes and left “after instigating the mob”, PTI reported. Eleven Muslims were killed in the attack.
Special Public Prosecutor Gaurang Vyas told Special Judge MK Dave that eyewitness accounts established Kodnani’s presence at Naroda Gam around 9 am on February 28, 2002, a day after 59 people died in a fire onboard the Sabarmati Express train in Godhra.
Vyas alleged that the defence’s witnesses – who had claimed that the former minister was either in the state Assembly in Gandhinagar or at the civil hospital in Ahmedabad’s Sola locality that day – had been “created only to save Kodnani”.
Kodnani herself has told the court that she was in the Assembly in the early hours of February 28 and then visited the Sola civil hospital, where the bodies of those who had died in Godhra had been brought.
Vyas maintained that Kodnani reached Naroda Gam around 9 am after leaving Gandhinagar 20 minutes earlier. Her mobile tower locations suggest that she reached Sola only around 10 am, he added.
“All these defence witnesses of Sola were either BJP leaders or relatives of the Godhra carnage victims,” Vyas alleged. “Officials or medical superintendent of the hospital were not examined by the defence. No independent witnesses were examined.”
On Wednesday, the Special Investigation Team told the court to discard Bharatiya Janata Party chief Amit Shah’s deposition as it was intended only to support Kodnani. Shah’s presence at Sola Civil hospital is also doubtful as despite being an MLA, nobody, even the accused like Babu Bajrangi, Jaideep Patel ever mentioned his presence,” Vyas had said.
Kodnani was also accused of instigating mobs to carry out massacres in Naroda Patiya. The trial court, which convicted her in the case in 2012 and sentenced her to 28 years in prison, described her as the kingpin of the single largest mass killing during the Gujarat carnage. However, in April, the Gujarat High Court overturned Kodnani’s conviction and acquitted her, ruling that none of the witnesses against her were reliable.
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