MUMBAI, April 24 -- The diametrically opposite "stories" put forth by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) "lead nowhere", and the witnesses proposed by the NIA were "mostly hearsay witnesses," the Bombay High Court observed in its order discharging the four accused arrested by the federal agency in the September 2006 Malegaon bomb blasts case. While the court discharged the four accused on Wednesday, the judges' observations were made in a detailed order, which became available on Thursday. The division bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Shyam C Chandak said the trial NIA court should not have discarded the ATS case merely on the basis of the charge-sheets subsequently filed by the NIA against an altogether different set of accused individuals. It was required to reconcile the conclusions drawn by the two investigating agencies - the ATS and CBI, which first probed the case, and the NIA, which took over the case in 2011. The bench added that the NIA, instead of conducting a further investigation, merely re-recorded statements of some of the accused individuals arrested by the ATS, and some ATS case witnesses, instead of collecting additional material. The 2006 Malegaon blasts case relates to four powerful bomb explosions in the town of Malegaon, in Maharashtra, on September 8, 2006. The bombs went off as people gathered to offer Friday prayers in the afternoon, killing 31 and injuring another 312. The Maharashtra ATS, the first agency to investigate the case, had claimed the blasts were the handiwork of 13 members of the terrorist outfit, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), and arrested nine of them. In February 2007, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the investigation, and filed a supplementary charge-sheet against the nine SIMI members. The case took a dramatic turn later in 2007, when Swami Assemanand, a former RSS activist arrested in two other bomb blast cases, claimed the 2006 Malegaon explosions had been carried out by Hindu right-wing extremists led by Sunil Joshi, a former RSS pracharak, and four of his associates - Rajendra Chaudhary, Lokesh Sharma, Dhan Singh and Manohar Ram Singh Narwaria. Joshi was killed in his hometown, Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh in December that year. In April 2011, the central government handed over the case to the NIA, which arrested the four accused, claiming they were associates of Joshi. The NIA claimed the ATS and CBI investigations were faulty, and the special NIA court on February 27, 2016, discharged all nine SIMI members, who had been arrested. On the NIA's urging, the special court on September 30, 2025, framed charges against the four right-wing activists, prompting them to approach the high court, challenging the order. The high court on Wednesday allowed their appeals and discharged all four. In a detailed order on Thursday, a division bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Shyam C Chandak said, "The things as they stand today give two contradictory versions of the incident, and both stories as floated by the ATS and NIA cannot be reconciled by any stretch of imagination." The bench said the evidence collected by the ATS against the nine SIMI members could not be wiped out from the record and should have been considered by the trial court even if the four accused were required to face trial. "There seems to be no answer in law as to how the trial judge can deal with the materials collected by the ATS, which implicates another set of accused persons," the judges said. "The case seems to have reached a dead end," the judges added. "The special judge overlooked the inherent contradiction and intrinsic improbability in the prosecution story as put forth by the NIA. There is no explanation coming forth as to how the voice samples and FSL reports collected by the ATS and CBI can be ignored by the trial court," said the high court order. The bench said that, typically, a further investigation is carried out to collect additional material against the same set of accused or additional accused individuals, but it was "a mystery" as to why the NIA did not collect fresh material. The agency merely re-recorded the statements of seven of the nine SIMI members arrested by the ATS, even though they had retracted their earlier statements. It also re-recorded the statements of some witnesses, who offered the NIA a different version. "A witness who gives two versions of a story and retracts his previous statement becomes an unreliable witness and his testimony is liable to be discarded," the bench said....