TNN
Nashik, Nov 4: At a time when protests over her arrest in the Malegaon blast seem to be spiralling into a political row with the BJP and Shiv Sena crying foul, sadhvi Pragya is learnt to have accepted that she had given her motorcycle, used in the crime in Malegaon last month, to the suspected bombers.
Senior sources said that sadhvi accepted ownership of the LML Freedom motorcycle, as also the fact that she had given it to Ramji, one of the suspects in the Malegaon blasts and is absconding.
While claiming to be ignorant about the conspiracy, sadhvi also said that her carelessness was punishable under law and that she was ready to face the consequences. More importantly, sadhvi also shared with cops the fact that Ramji, when asked by her about the whereabouts of the motorcycle, nonchalantly told her that the vehicle was used in the Malegaon attack.
There are witnesses to the conversation where Ramji also told a concerned sadhvi, who had by then been asked by cops to account for her vehicle, that she could shake off the police by telling them whom she had loaned the motorcycle to.
One of the witnesses, one Dharmendra of Madhya Pradesh, has since recalled the details of the conversation in a statement he made under Section 164, CrPC, before an Indore court, and which can be used as evidence in court.
Dharmendra’s statement can work to sadhvi’s benefit by helping her defence argue that the role of the former Durga Vahini activist was peripheral, but can strengthen the cops’ case against other Hindu radicals. Politically, it can discomfit the BJP which, in a major deviation from its ‘tough-on-terror’ script, has been insinuating that the sadhvi is the victim of a frame-up or ‘sponsored investigation’.
In fact, the sadhvi, even with her ‘peripheral’ role, would have been liable to be punished severely under the provision of POTA, the defunct special anti-terror law that the party and its saffron partner Shiv Sena, pine for. It was a lapse on the part of the plotters which helped cops reach Sadhvi.
While Ramji and other suspects took the precaution to erase the chassis number on the LML Freedom motorcycle to wipe out the evidence of its ownership, cops managed to retrieve some of the digits on the body by a scientific process. The investigators were helped by another lapse by the conspirators: they forgot to erase the 03/03 marking on its rim — the month and year of manufacture and a vital detail for the cops to scan the reams of records with the manufacturer. After that, it was easy to find that the vehicle was sold to Pragya in August 2008.