High Court picks holes in way state probed 26/11 and Karkare killing

The division bench of Justice B H Marlapalle and Justice U D Salvi asked why the conspiracy behind the attack was not investigated thoroughly. Chief public prosecutor P A Pol said he would file a report within two weeks.

“Why were the inputs received by the IB as early as November 19,2008,not shared with the state? If the Pradhan committee was not given the details of the intelligence when sought,what is the use of the committee report? Some accountability has to be there,” Justice Marlapalle said.

The judges observed police had under surveillance around 35 SIM cards and the preliminary probe showed the subscribers had casually said they had lost the cards. The court said,“We need to know whether there was a system failure in the state at the time of the attack.”

Justice Marlapalle added then MTDC chief Bhushan Gagrani has confirmed that a terrorist,also alleged to have killed Karkare,was speaking in Marathi. “If a terrorist is speaking in Marathi,surely he won’t be from Pakistan.”

The court asked why calls were not probed until after Karkare was killed. “The ATS started surveillance of the calls made by the terrorists at Hotel Taj,Trident-Oberoi and Nariman House,only after Karkare was killed? Why is it so? Till then was the attack not so important?”

Justice Marlapalle said the fact that 16 CCTV cameras at the CST main platform were not functioning raises the question if had they been tampered with before the attack.

Pol’s response to the queries was,“The IB receives intelligence inputs on a daily basis and most of them are false,so we don’t act on all of them”.

The court was hearing two petitions,one by former Bihar MLA Radhakant Yadav,the other by a Jyoti Bedekar,alleging that Karkare’s death was orchestrated by IB personnel and members of Abhinav Bharat.