Mumbai, Feb. 23 -- The Maharashtra ATS arrested 13 men in the 7/11 bomb blasts case of 2006. On November 30 that year, it filed a charge sheet against the 13 arrested and 17 wanted accused, including 12 Pakistani nationals. In the trial that concluded in 2015, the prosecution examined 192 witnesses to prove its case against the 13 accused and the accused examined 28 witnesses in support of their claim of innocence. On September 30, 2015, a special MCOCA court convicted 12 of them and acquitted Wahid Shaikh. The 12 convicts -- five sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment -- appealed against their conviction in the Bombay high court. At the very beginning of the 671-page judgment that the Bombay high court pronounced on July 21, 2025, acquitting the 12 convicts, the judges wrote, "Punishing the actual perpetrator of a crime is a concrete and essential step toward curbing criminal activities, upholding the rule of law, and ensuring the safety and security of citizens. But creating a false appearance of having solved a case by presenting that the accused have been brought to justice gives a misleading sense of resolution. This deceptive closure undermines public trust and falsely reassures society, while in reality, the true threat remains at large." The Maharashtra government has challenged the acquittal of the 12 accused in the 7/11 bomb blasts case in the Supreme Court. The high court's decision came as a major embarrassment for the ATS after the court acquitted all of them of all charges -- including the five death row convicts. The court said that the prosecution had "utterly failed to establish the offence beyond the reasonable doubt against the accused on each count." Kamal Ahmed Ansari, also sentenced to death by the trial court in 2015, ran a chicken shop and sold vegetables in Madhubani, Bihar, He was the only one of the 12 men who did not live to see his acquittal. He died in jail in 2021 at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic....