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Nine-year ordeal comes to an end

COIMBATORE: Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party in Kerala Abdul Nasser Maudhany was released on bail from the Coimbatore Central Prison on Wednesday after the Special Court for Bomb Blasts Cases here cleared him of all the charges framed against him.

The court said that the charges of conspiracy, possession and control over explosives and causing communal hatred laid against him had not been proved. Mr. Maudhany had been in prison for nine years.

Leaving the prison for Kerala by road around 7.45 p.m., Mr. Maudhany told presspersons that he would strive to improve the relations between Kerala and Tamil Nadu. “I will also provide every possible legal aid to the other accused in the case, who are in prison.”

Mr. Maudhany said he would do whatever was good to Tamil Nadu and its people. “After all, I have taken the food of this (Tamil Nadu’s) soil, even though I was in prison for over nine years.”

The PDP leader thanked the Government of Kerala and also its people for the support shown to him. “I am dedicating my life to the people of Kerala.” When told of Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s wish that Mr. Maudhany would take a stance free from religious considerations, the PDP Chairman swore that he would continue to take the secular path.

The delivering of judgment in the cases relating to the February 14, 1998 serial blasts here began on Wednesday.

Mr. Maudhany was listed as the 14th accused in the chargesheet filed by the Special Investigation Team of the Crime Branch-CID that probed the blasts.

The SIT had laid five charges against the PDP leader under the following sections: Section 120 B (conspiracy) and Section 153 A (causing enmity between two religious communities) of the Indian Penal Code, and Sections 4 (b) and 6 (4) (b) of The Explosives Substances Act, 1908 (for possession of explosives and abetting acts deemed as offences under the Act). Wife’s reaction:

“We always knew he was innocent,” Soofiya Maudhany, wife of the PDP leader, said soon after hearing that her husband was now a free man.

Waiting at a hotel less than a km away from the court, Ms. Soofiya Maudhany, her sons Umar Mukthar (13) and Salahuddin Ayub (10), and their relatives stepped out to meet the media soon after receiving the news. “Avasaanam verudhe v ittu” (finally, they released him), was her reply in Malayalam to a stream of calls on her mobile phone. Asked what she meant by saying so, she said that Mr. Maudhany had been languishing in jail for nine years for nothing.

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