MUMBAI: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) began its arguments before the Bombay high court on Wednesday in its appeal against bail granted last month by a special trial court to former Mumbai police officer Sachin Waze in the Antilia bomb scare and Mansukh Hiran murder case of 2021. The NIA has said the observations in the bail order are “purely based on surmises… and inferences at its whims and fancies’’ and totally against what the NIA chargesheet of September 3, 2021 states.The HC had on September 30 stayed the bail order of September 29.Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh for the NIA began by taking the HC division bench of Justices GS Kulkarni and Neela Gokhale through the chargesheet against Waze, who he said had planned the planting of the 20 gelatin sticks and threat note in his friend Hiran’s four-wheeler “to create terror not just in the minds of one family but in the entire society.’’The NIA said the special trial Judge added “facts and narrations which are not part of the chargesheet’’ and it also took umbrage at the “personal remarks’’ the special Judge made on the “diligent investigation of the State police and NIA’’ and sought that they be expunged.Waze is also the main accused in the Hiran murder case said the ASG and was as a police officer, in charge of investigating both the cases, himself. Singh said Waze, plotted the murder as he allegedly found Hiran to be a “weak link’’. Waze had asked Hiran to lodge a car-theft case but soon after the bomb-scare at Carmichael Road, Hiran’s body was retrieved from Reti Bunder creek in Thane.The NIA submitted additional grounds in its appeal. It reminded the HC that it was a case of terror under the stringent anti-terror law, the UAPA which stipulates stricter test before granting bail to an accused. The NIA said, “The Statute does not permit the Court to carve out one offence, treat it as outside the UA(P) Act, and grant bail on that footing.’’The ASG said the trial court completely blew hot and cold at the same time in its order, and gave contradictory findings. While the special NIA court said it was “satisfied’’ to frame terror charges based on the probe record, it applied a “different yardstick’’ while drawing a prima facie conclusion that no case was made out while granting bail.The NIA’s additional submissions say, “A vehicle laden with explosives was left on a public road in a densely populated residential locality, with a note threatening to blow up an entire family. That act was plainly likely to strike terror in the residents, passers-by and persons working in the area, and in the family named in the note.”The threat note itself warns that the next time the material would come fully connected, the NIA says yet the trial court in its bail order holds that without a detonator the gelatin sticks were “useless’’ as submitted by the defence and observed that it “is not countered successfully by the prosecution.” “Accepting a defence version over the forensic material is impermissible at the stage of section 43D(5) UAPA”, the provisions governing bail under the special law, the NIA said.The NIA says the Section 15(1) UAPA covers an act done “with intent to strike terror or likely to strike terror in the people or any section of the people.” The two expressions are disjunctive, and likelihood is judged objectively from the nature of the act. The learned Special Court nonetheless holds that it is “impossible to accept that, any such terror was in fact ever created in the mind of anyone”. On that basis it faults the prosecution for not recording statements of the Ambani family. Neither actual terror nor a statement of the intended victim is an ingredient of the offence.The hearing will continue on Thursday.
