Swami Aseemanand, a former leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh or RSS, has been found not guilty of any link to a bombing at the famous Ajmer Dargah near Jaipur in 2007.
He has been accused of masterminding the attack by the National Investigation Agency which handles terror cases. A special court has convicted three others accused in the case.
The charges against Aseemanand and six others included murder and spreading communal hatred. Three people have been convicted today by a court in Jaipur for the bombing which killed three people and injured at least 15 at the hugely-popular shrine for Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer.
Aseemanand is an accused in several other cases of bombing including at Malegaon in Maharashtra in 2006 in which nearly 40 people were killed, Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid in 2007 and the explosion in the same year on the Samjhauta Express in which nearly 70 passengers were killed on the train running between India and Pakistan.
He was jailed in 2010 after allegedly admitting to his involvement in the terror attack on the train. He later said he had been tortured and made to give a false statement.
The 78-year-old has been named in five major terror attacks between 2006 and 2008 in different cities, many of them described controversially as “Hindutva terror” on account of the alleged involvement of right-wing extremists.