Rajasthan High Court grants bail to two Ajmer Dargah blast convicts bail

A division bench of Justice Manish Bhandari issued the order of giving bail to the convicted - Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Patel.

JAIPUR: The Rajasthan High Court on Thursday granted bail to two convicts serving a life term in the Ajmer Dargah bomb blasts that killed three people. A division bench of Justice Manish Bhandari issued the order of giving bail to the convicted — Devendra Gupta and Bhavesh Patel.

They were both serving a life sentence after being convicted by a CBI Special Court in March 2017. Advocate JS Rana who filed a bail application for both the convicts said that there was no evidence against them and that they were convicted only on the basis of probabilities. It was argued in the case of Devendra Gupta that a broker had misused the documents he had submitted while applying for a driving license. 

Upon hearing the pleas, the judge suspended the sentence of the two and issued the order of bail. Rana said that both the accused will come out of jail on Friday. The explosion in the 13th-century dargah of Sufi mystic Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti on October 11, 2007, during Ramzan, had left three persons dead and 17 injured. The dargah was packed with devotees when the blast occurred at the time of iftaar. 

The court had convicted Gupta, Patel and Sunil Joshi acquitted several other accused in the case that included controversial former RSS activist Swami Aseemanand. The blast was the first instance in which the investigating agencies had found involvement of right-wing Hindutva organisations, including Abhinav Bharat, which was later suspected to be linked to several other blast cases.

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