On Friday, three did a U-turn in court on Samjhauta Express blast statements

“Three witnesses in the Samjhauta Express case, namely Shivam Dhakad, Kavita and Ganpati, turned hostile yesterday before the Panchkula court,” special public prosecutor R K Handa confirmed to The Sunday Express.

He did not wish to elaborate on how the retractions would affect the case, saying he needed to refer to the case papers.

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A senior NIA officer, who did not wish to be named, said: “A lot of witnesses are relatives or close friends of the accused, and it is not surprising for them to go back on their statements. However, the trial is progressing well and more than 180 witnesses have been examined so far.”

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Kavita is the wife of accused Bharat Mohan Lal alias Bharat Bhai, a resident of Valsad who allegedly met Swami Aseemanand in 1999 and became his close disciple. It is alleged that one of the conspiracy meetings, attended by Aseemanand, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, Sunil Joshi, Sandeep Dange, Ramji Kalsangra, Lokesh Sharma and Amit Chauhan, was held in June 2006 at Bharat Bhai’s residence called Thakurghar in Valsad.

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A close associate of murdered accused Sunil Joshi, Dhakad was said to be an RSS sharirik pramukh in Dewas. His elder brother, Rameshwar Dhakad, was described as a Madhya Pradesh BJP worker. Arrested by the Ujjain police on charges of murder, Dhakad was lodged in judicial custody in 2011 when he gave a statement to the NIA which is part of the Samjhauta Express case.

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In his statement, Dhakad had claimed that Hindu extremists, named by the NIA in the Samjhauta Express blast case, also intended to kill the chief guest of a function at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in 2006 after the university changed its decision and invited a Muslim instead of BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi. Dhakad had also claimed that in 2005, he went to Kolkata to conduct a reconnaissance of the residence of Justice U C Banerjee who was heading the Godhra train burning inquiry panel.

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The NIA claimed Dhakad told them that he, along with 12 others, received training in arms and explosives in 2006 in a forest near the Bagli-Dewas border. He said Ramji Kalsangra imparted training in bomb-making and also demonstrated how to set off an explosion. All thirteen men practised pistol firing, he said in his statement.

Dhakad is also a witness in the May 2007 Mecca Masjid blast case probed by the NIA in which he gave a statement on one of the accused in the case who attended an alleged conspiracy meeting in Jaipur in 2005.

An explosion on the Samjhauta Express on the night of February 18-19, 2007 killed 68 people, including Pakistani nationals.

An initial chargesheet was filed on June 20, 2011 against five accused; a first supplementary chargesheet was filed against two accused persons on August 9, 2012 and a second supplementary chargesheet against one accused on June 12, 2013 before the NIA special court in Panchkula. Trial of the case began on February 24 last year.