A court in Indore on Monday sentenced SIMI operative Safdar Nagori and 10 others to life imprisonment on charges of sedition and indulging in terrorist activities.
Besides Nagori, who is a former general secretary of banned Students Islamic Movement of India, Qamruddin, Shaduli, Kamran, Yaseen, Dr. Ahmad Baig, Amil Parvez, Ansar Hafeez, Shivni and Munroz were also awarded life term by the court.
Munroz, who was out on bail, was also arrested by police to serve the sentence, said the District Prosecution Officer Vimal Mishra.
The CBI court delivered the verdict through video conferencing as all convicts including Nagori are presently lodged in Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati jail in Gujarat.
Being tried for Ahmedabad bomb blast cases, the accused heard the quantum of punishment in Gujarat jail.
The convicted members of the SIMI were awarded life imprisonment for possessing weapons, explosives and ammunition and also for plotting anti-national activities, according to local media reports.
The police, in 2008, had accused them of planning terror attacks in the country. Explosives, firearms and ammunition, among other things, were also recovered from a farmhouse near Indore on the intervening night of March 26-27, 2008.
The death toll in the attacks, carried out on July 26, 2008, was reportedly 57 people. Nagori had been lodged at Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad for a long period before he was sentenced.
Students’ outfit SIMI was banned in 2001 and a case was registered against Nagori in Ujjain’s Mahakal Police Station way back in 1997. Thereafter, he was declared an absconder on December 11, 2000.
Reportedly, serial blasts in Ahmedabad carried out on July 26 was part of a larger conspiracy, hatched by IM and SIMI in order to foment terror in Gujarat to avenge the 2002 post-Godhra riots killings of Muslims.
