Thirteen years after advocate Shahid Azmi was murdered, his trial which was stayed for six months, will resume next week. Azmi, known for representing clients he believed to be falsely implicated in terror cases, was shot dead at his office in suburban Mumbai in 2010. He was 33.
One of the accused, Hasmukh Solanki, had sought the transfer of the trial to another judge alleging that the trial was not being conducted in a fair and unbiased manner. His application of transfer was rejected by the principal judge on August 10, 2022. He appealed against it in the Bombay High Court in August, 2022.
After reserving the judgment in September last year, on February 7, 2023, Justice P.D. Naik rejected the said application and noted, “No case is made out for transfer of investigation. I do not find any reason to come to the conclusion that the learned Judge was biased against the applicant. There is no material to apprehend for the applicant that he would not get a fair trial before the learned Judge. Hence, no case is made out for transferring the proceedings to any other Sessions Judge.”
Special public prosecutor Vaibhav Bagade said, “Now that the stay on the trial is lifted, we will resume the trial soon. Eleven witnesses have been examined and around eight witnesses are left.”
All the accused — Devendra Jagptap, Pintu Dagale, Vinod Vichare and Mr. Solanki — were arrested on the same day and later were let out on bail. Another accused gangster Santhosh Shetty, former aide of don Chhota Rajan, was discharged from the case in 2014.
Azmi was representing many accused in the 7/11 train blasts cases, Malegaon 2006 bomb blasts cases, the Aurangabad arms haul case, and the Ghatkopar blasts case. Hansal Mehta’s 2013 film Shahid starring Rajkummar Rao is based on the life and work of Azmi.
Advocate Khalid Azmi took over most of his brother’s cases after his murder and said, “I appeared for some of the accused in 26/11, 7/11 and Malegaon 2006 cases.”
On February 11, 2010, Azmi was at home around 8 p.m. when his office boy told him that some of his clients were waiting at his office. Upon reaching his office, he saw two men waiting inside his cabin and two waiting outside. As Azmi called them in, they allegedly shot him. The office boy immediately ran and called his mother to the office. She, along with others, took Azmi to a hospital where he was declared “brought dead”.
At the age of 14, Azmi was arrested by the Mumbai Police for allegedly indulging in violence during the 1992 Mumbai riots. however he was released as he was a juvenile. In 1994, he was arrested again for an alleged conspiracy to kill former Shiv Sena supremo late Bal Thackeray. Although the Supreme Court acquitted him in the case, he was incarcerated at Tihar Jail for seven years where he started studying law.
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