Victims feel let down in Mecca Masjid blast case

​Hyderabad: The kin of the victims of Mecca Masjid blast cried foul over the verdict of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) Special Court, Nampally, which acquitted all the accused citing lack of substantial evidence on Monday. Five accused, including Swami Aseemanand, were acquitted in the bomb blast case, in which nine people died.

“It is expected of the Bharatiya Janata Party regime. Our men have died, but none is going to be punished; what sort of the judicial system is it?” questioned Mohd Omar, whose brother-in-law Mohd Jafar was killed in the bomb blast on May 18, 2007, while offering Friday prayers. Omar’s younger sister Tahseen Sultana was married to Jafar a few months before the bomb blast. 

Saleema Begum, mother of the 16-year-old Syed Ghouse who was hurt in the blast when he was 5-years-old, said: “It was a close shave for my son. He was badly injured in the blast. Even now, he cannot move or fold one of his fingers of his left hand,” she said and pointed out that “our men” were initially wrongly implicated in the case and confined for several days and brutally tortured. 

And irony is that the actual perpetrators were let off.  Shaik Athiq, whose father was injured and became bedridden after the blast, said: “This is very inhuman. We didn’t get justice. What was the National Investigation Agency doing all these days? 

After my father was hospitalised, I had to toil in order to get bread and butter for my family.” Athiq was also present in the masjid at the time of blast. “I was not aware that my father got injured in the blast but came to know about it a little later,” he recalled.

By: Kartheek B