Click to play videoMumbai: Malegaon blast accused Sadhvi Pragya Thakur on Monday charged the Maharashtra Police's Anti-Terrorism Squad with making her hear an obscene CD and repeated her earlier allegation that the agency had tortured her.
Thakur alleged there was no lady officer present during her interrogation and the officials made her watch an obscene CD.
Thakur along with seven other accused, Lt Col Prasad Purohit, Shivnarain Singh Kalsangra, Shyam Sahu, Sameer Kulkarni, Major (retired) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar and Rakesh Dhawde were produced before the designated MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act) court in Mumbai on Monday.
Upadhyay told the court that A N Roy, Director General of Maharashtra Police, met him on October 26 and threatened that his men would beat him up if he did not confess to the blast.
Kalsangra and Sahu too alleged that they had been tortured.
Accused in judicial custody
In what could be considered a setback to the ATS, the court remanded the accused to judicial custody till December 3 and turned down the plea to keep them in police custody under MCOCA.
The ATS had last week booked the accused under the MCOCA that would enable them to get their remand any number of times in a period of 180 days from the date the September 29 offence was registered.
The allegations made by the Sadhvi in the affidavit her lawyer Avinash Bhide filed in the Nashik court last week have already raised a political storm across the country.
While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh telephoned senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani after the latter hit out at the ATS for meting out barbaric treatment to the Sadhvi, his emissary, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan assured Advani of a probe into the Sadhvi's allegations.
Another key accused Purohit also repeated his earlier allegation of torture against the ATS.
A third accused, retired Major Ramesh Upadhyay told the court that Maharashtra DGP AN Roy forced a confession out of him.
Upadhyay says Roy met him on October 26 and told him that his men will beat him up if he doesn't confess to having a hand in the blast. In fact Upadhyay says Additional Commisioner of Police Parambir Singh did beat him with shoes.
Similar charges of torture were repeated by the other accused Shivnarayan Singh and Shyam Bhavarlal Sahu.
(With inputs from IANS and PTI)
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