Twelve men wrongfully convicted in the 2006 Mumbai suburban train blasts spent years enduring incarceration that went far beyond judicial punishment. Five of them were kept on death row for nearly a decade in solitary confinement, despite their death sentences never being confirmed. All twelve were finally acquitted by the Bombay High Court in July 2025.
Sentenced first, humanity forgotten
In September 2015, a trial court sentenced five men to death and seven to life imprisonment for the July 2006 train blasts. They were transferred from Arthur Road Jail to Phansi Yards at Nagpur Central Jail and Yerawada Central Jail. Prison authorities treated them as definitively guilty, enforcing isolation, denying work, reading material, and basic rights meant to distinguish undertrials from confirmed death-row convicts.
Solitary confinement without confirmation
For nearly ten years, the men were locked in small concrete cells for up to 16 hours a day. Prison rules and Supreme Court precedents, including the Sunil Batra judgment, were ignored. Survivors later said prison officials refused to recognise the legal distinction between “prisoners under sentence of death” and those whose appeals were pending.
Psychological scars and irreversible loss
The prolonged isolation caused severe psychological harm. Several inmates across Phansi Yards died by suicide, while others developed serious mental illness. One of the blast case accused, Kamal Ahmed Ansari, died in custody in 2021 after contracting COVID-19, never living to see his acquittal.
Former death-row prisoners Ehtesham Siddiqui and Asif Bashir Khan later described the Phansi Yard as a place where “every prisoner is a world of one”, marked by silence, despair, and constant surveillance.
Beyond acquittal, a larger question
While the 2025 verdict restored their legal innocence, it could not undo a decade of suffering. The case has reopened urgent questions about custodial violence, misuse of anti-terror prosecutions, and the human cost of the death penalty within India’s prison system.