A special court on Friday sentenced 11 persons to life imprisonment for murder, 12 to seven years in jail for arson and rioting and one person to 10 years in jail in the Gulbarg Society massacre case. Sixty-nine persons, including former MP Ehsan Jafri, were burnt to death at the housing society in Ahmedabad during the 2002 post-Godhra communal riots in Gujarat.
Ruling out the capital punishment to the 11 convicts as demanded by the prosecution lawyer, special trial court judge P.B. Desai held that the “convicts are not a menace to society and they can be reformed.”
The court called the massacre as the “darkest day of civil society” and urged the government not to remit the sentence of the 11 persons. The court held that the sentence should run concurrently and not consecutively as demanded by the prosecution during the hearing on the quantum of punishment to the convicts.
Zakia Jafri, wife of Ehsan Jafri, described the verdict as “disappointing.” She said the accused have got away with a “lighter sentence” despite the fact they had roasted people alive in Gulbarg Society.
On June 2, 2016, the court convicted 24 persons and acquitted 36 in the case after a protracted trial that began in 2009. A former police inspector of the area and a local BJP leader were among the acquitted.
The court dropped the conspiracy charge in the case as it did not find the attack on the Society as a “pre-planned conspiracy”.
Gulbarg Society was one of the worst cases during the 2002 riots in the State. This is the eighth of the nine cases the Supreme Court appointed SIT had probed and whose trial was monitored by the court. The Naroda Gaam massacre case is the only remaining case where the trial is under way.
The Gulbarg Society case trial saw many twists and turns and controversies from the beginning, prompting the apex court to stay its trial along with other most crucial cases after the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) filed a petition challenging the investigation by the Gujarat police.
In 2008, the apex court constituted a SIT to reinvestigate the nine cases and special designated courts were set up for trial.
The court completed the trial in September 2015 but was restrained by the apex court from pronouncing its verdict. Subsequently, the apex court directed the trial court to pass the verdict by May 31, 2016.
As many as 338 witnesses were examined by the court during the trial that began in 2009, almost seven years after the gruesome massacre.
@Agency report.
