Babri Masjid Demolition Case: HC to Hear Plea Against Acquittal of 32 Accused, Including BJP Leader LK Advani, Today

A petition challenging the acquittal of all the 32 accused persons, including former union ministers L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and some others, by the special CBI court here last year in Babri demolition case, will come up for hearing on Monday.

The petition was filed in January 2021 by Haji Mehboob and Haji Saiyyad Akhlaq Ahmad, both natives of Ayodhya, on behalf of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). Both were litigants in the Babri mosque demolition case.

Mehboob and Ahmad presented themselves as witnesses in the case and also as aggrieved persons in the riots that followed the Babri mosque demolition on December 6, 1992.

Special Judge (CBI) S K Yadav, in his verdict, had said that the demolition of the disputed structure was not “pre-planned” and that it was the handiwork of some “anti-social elements’’, who were among the thousands of “karsevaks”.

The 2300-page judgment ruled out any criminal conspiracy behind the razing of the disputed structure and found it to be a “spontaneous act”.

“There is not enough evidence to show that the demolition was pre-planned,’’ he remarked.

The special judge had also said that the cassette of the speeches of the accused persons, which were introduced as evidence by the CBI, were “tampered” with and were “not sealed”. The court also said that the negatives of the photographs of the accused persons were not furnished by the CBI.

Besides Advani, Joshi, Uma Bharti, those acquitted, included Vinay Katyar, Sadhvi Ritambhara, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, Ram Vilas Vedanti, Mahant Dharm Das, Satish Pradhan, Pawan Kumar Pandey, Lallu Singh, Prakash Verma, Vijay Bahadur Singh, Santosh Dubey, Gandhi Yadav, Ramji Gupta, Braj Bhushan Saran Singh, Kamalesh Tripathi, Ramchandra Khatri, Jai Bhagwan Goyal, Om Prakash Pandey, Jaibhan Singh, Sakshi Maharaj, Vinay Kumar Rai, Naveen Shukla, R N Srivastava, Acharya Dharmendra Dev, Sudhir Kakkad and Dharmednra Gujjar.

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