Bilal Ismail Abdul Majid alias Haji Bilal (61), who was held guilty of the carnage of 59 innocent Ram Bhakta Hindus in 2002 at Godhra in Gujarat died on November 26 at Vadodara’s SSG hospital.
Bilal was serving life imprisonment at Vadodara Central Jail after he was convicted of involvement in the Godhra massacre. He was under treatment for an aliment for over four years. On November 22, his health deteriorated and he was rushed to SSG hospital. He was kept on oxygen support but he died during treatment. After the post-mortem, police handed over the body to his family. Owing to his poor health, he was granted parole earlier, and had returned to jail after the parole term was over.
Assistant Commissioner of Police A V Rajgor said that Bilal was suffering from a heart ailment and regular hypertension.
Bilal was among 11 Muslims who were awarded the death penalty by a special court of Judge PR Patel in Ahmedabad in March 2011, in the Godhra train carnage. Later on, their sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Gujarat high court. Another 20 people were sentenced to life imprisonment in the case.
The court had described them as the ‘core committee’ that had planned the mass murder of 59 Hindus on February 27, 2002, when they were returning from Ayodhya in the Sabarmati Express.
At Godhra in the Panchmahal district of Gujarat, the mob comprising over a thousand Islamic fanatics targeted coach number S6 of Sabarmati Express in which karsevaks were travelling. The mob surrounded the coach, poured fuel on it and set it on fire, leading to the tragic death of the karsevaks. The incident had triggered the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
Besides murder and conspiracy, Bilal was held guilty for obstructing firefighters from reaching to burning coach that possibility could have saved lives.
The court had called this case rarest of the rare. Even Gujarat government-appointed inquiry commission, headed by Justice Nanavati, had concluded train burning was the result of a pre-planned conspiracy and not an accident.
In October 2017, the division bench of Justices A.S. Dave and G.R. Udhwani of Gujarat High Court commuted their death sentence to life imprisonment.