THE Bombay High Court today acquitted five persons named in the Best Bakery killings during the Gujarat 2002 riots,while upholding conviction of four. While Sanjay Thakkar,Bahadur Singh Chauhan,Shanabhai Baria and Dinesh Rajbhar were sentenced to life imprisonment,Rajubhai Baria,Pankaj Gosavi,Jagdish Rajput,Shailesh Tadvi and Suresh Vasava were acquitted for lack of adequate evidence. Fourteen people had been killed at the Best Bakery in Vadodara after a mob attacked it on March 1,2002. Eleven of these belonged to the Sheikh family that owned the bakery. In April 2004,the Supreme Court had transferred the case to Maharashtra. In February 2006,a sessions court in Mumbai had convicted nine of the total 17 accused and handed them life. In their order on Monday,Justices V M Kanade and P D Kode relied heavily on four witnesses,all of them workers at the bakery. The judgment noted that they attributed specific roles to four of those convicted,about them carrying swords etc. No specific role was attributed to five others and benefit of doubt had been given to them,the judges said. On the role of witnesses,the order said they had escaped death. Normally such witnesses would not falsely implicate accused.
