New Delhi: The Supreme Court has granted bail to 8 people convicted of killing 59 people by setting fire to a coach of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Gujarat in 2002. All these people were sentenced to life imprisonment by the lower court and the High Court. The Supreme Court granted them bail on the basis of spending 17-18 years in jail. However, the court has denied bail to 4 people who were sentenced to death by the lower court and commuted to life imprisonment by the High Court.
The names of those who got bail are- Abdul Sattar Gaddi, Yunus Abdul Haq, Mohd. Haneef, Abdul Rauf, Ibrahim Abdul Razaq, Ayub Abdul Ghani, Soheb Yusuf and Suleman Ahmed. All these people have been found guilty of preventing the people who were burning in the train from coming out. The 4 people who have been refused release by the court today are Anwar Mohammad, Soukat Abdullah, Mehboob Yakub Mitha and Siddiq Mohammad Mora. The blame of direct involvement in the murder has been proved on them. The Gujarat government has demanded the death penalty for them.
Of the total 31 convicts in the case, 11 were awarded death sentence by the lower court, while 20 were given life imprisonment. In October 2017, the Gujarat High Court commuted the death sentence of 11 people to life imprisonment. At the same time, the High Court had upheld the sentence of 20 people who got life imprisonment from the lower court. The appeal of all these people is pending in the Supreme Court.
In December last year too, the Supreme Court had granted bail to one of the convicts in the case, Farooq. In the lower court, Farooq was convicted of stone pelting to prevent people from coming out of the burning compartment of the train. In that case also, the Supreme Court had made the basis of this fact that Farooq has been in jail for 17 years. Whereas, on April 18 this year, the Supreme Court has rejected the bail pleas of Irfan Ghanchi and Siraj Meda due to the death sentence awarded to them by the lower court. The Supreme Court has not yet considered the bail of many convicts.
