The state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad was left red-faced, after the man touted by Union home minister P. Chidambaram as the key suspect in the Pune German bakery blast, was granted bail by the sessions court on Tuesday.
Bhatkal resident Abdul Samad had been booked by the ATS in an arms seizure case of August 2009. The court granted him bail, for the lack of evidence.
Admitting the flaws in the ATS investigation, director-general of police, D. Sivanandan, said, “Pehli galti (the first mistake) was the terror attack that took place at the German bakery while the second was the wrong investigations in the case.”
Samad was arrested from the Mangalore airport, on May 24 after he flew in from Dubai. At the time of the arrest, Mr Chidambaram had gone to the extent of saying that Samad was a key suspect in the Pune blast, which had left 17 persons dead. Images from a CCTV were also circulated in the media to suggest that Samad could have planted the bomb. However, soon there were doubts over his involvement in the terror attack. His relatives claimed that on the day of the blast, Samad was in Bengaluru, attending a wedding. The ATS finally did not even name him as an accused in the case and booked him for a case under the Arms Act.
Samad’s first bail plea filed before a magistrate was rejected. His lawyer, Mubin Solkar, then moved a sessions court with the same application. “I argued that his name had not cropped up in a single .remand related to the arms seizure case from August 2009 to May 2010. Clearly, he had been framed by the police,” Mr Solkar said. He also pointed out that three other men named in the case were all out on bail and by those standards Samad deserved to be released too.
Mr Solkar clarified that the issue of Samad’s involvement in the Pune blast was never even brought up before court, because it was an allegation that the prosecution itself had never made.