BOMBAY, 14 September 2006 — The prosecution yesterday urged the Special Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA) court to hand down death penalty to the four members of the Tiger Memon family found guilty of the serial Bombay blasts that killed 257 people.
Yakub, Essa, Yusuf and Rubina were found guilty of involvement in the 1993 bomb blasts by the TADA court on Tuesday. Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam told judge P.D. Kode the convicts deserved no mercy and demanded that they be sentenced to death.
The Memon family changed their lawyer Majeed Memon, who was kept away from defending the accused on Tuesday. The new lawyer Harshad Ponda told the court he needed time to prepare his argument. The judge then deferred the verdict to today.
Four relatives of Tiger Memon, an alleged key plotter and one of 30 suspects still on the run, were found guilty yesterday of abetting the attacks in the marathon trial’s first verdicts. But they were not accused of planting any of the 12 devices that exploded on March 12, 1993. One bomb failed to go off.
The verdicts will be handed down to 22 men accused of carrying out the attacks, prosecutor Nikam later told reporters outside the court yesterday.
First in the dock will be Mohammad Kasam Ghansar, who is accused of murder by carrying out a blast from a scooter packed with explosives outside a jewelry market, which killed 17, Nikam told AFP.
In another development, the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad defused a live bomb yesterday at the crowded Hamidia market on Kidwai Road in Malegaon.
Soon after receiving the information that a bomb had been planted in one of the buildings in the area, police squads had vacated the complex and cordoned off the surrounding marketplace. The bomb was later removed to an open playground where the police teams including the bomb disposal squad defused the explosive.
