India: India's highest court ordered a retrial yesterday of a high-profile murder case after 20 Hindus were acquitted of slaying 12 people during religious riots in Gujarat state in 2002.
The Supreme Court ordered Gujarat's Hindu nationalist government to take up the issue of a retrial through state prosecutors. In a rare move, it also ordered that the new trial be moved from Gujarat to neighbouring Maharashtra state.
"This judgment is a victory for justice, secularism and the Indian constitution," said Mihir Desai, a lawyer for survivor and main witness Ms Zahira Sheikh (20).
The Best Bakery case, named after the shop where the killings happened, has come to symbolise the lack of major progress in bringing to account those responsible for the riots in which rights groups say about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died.
The riots broke out after 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in an attack on a train.
Ms Sheikh had appealed to the Supreme Court for a retrial outside Gujarat after saying that she had been intimidated into changing her testimony in the original case.
"This is a historic judgement. Retrials are very rare in India. And it's even rarer for a trial to be transferred on the basis of a statement by one witness," another of her lawyers, Aparna Bhat, said.
Senior Gujarat official K Nityanandam said the government had yet to receive a copy of the order, but added no appeal was possible and it would have no choice but to implement the ruling.
Teesta Setalvad, editor of the magazine Communalism Combat and an activist helping riot victims, said she hoped the verdict would give fresh hope to survivors.
"This will definitely send out a positive signal to all those involved in the trial of other riot cases," she said.
Twenty Hindus and a Muslim were charged with murder after a mob of about 100 people attacked the bakery, owned and run by Ms Sheikh's family, on March 1st, 2002, and killed 12 people inside, including three Hindus.
But a Gujarat state court acquitted them in July last year because of a lack of evidence.
Ms Sheikh said later she had been repeatedly threatened that if she spoke the truth in court, she and her family would be killed.
"We had locked ourselves on the terrace. The crowd had swords, sticks, petrol cans. My sister, uncle and three of his children who were downstairs were all burned alive," she told reporters after the acquittal.
Officials say 1,000 people were killed in the Gujarat riots, India's worst religious violence in a decade, but human rights groups say the real toll was at least twice that. - (Reuters)