Haren Pandya murder case: Gujarat HC gives state govt six months to decide on shooter’s remission plea

Ahmedabad: Gujarat High Court has ordered the state govt to take a decision within six months on an application filed by the sharpshooter in the Haren Pandya murder case, Mohammed Asghar Ali.

Convicted to a life term, Ali moved the HC and submitted that the state govt had not acted on his plea for remission and premature release. His counsel argued that he had served 14 years in prison and that his conduct in jail was also good.Pandya, a former state home minister, was shot dead on March 26, 2006. Ali was arrested a few days after the murder, which according to a CBI probe, was carried out in retaliation for the 2002 riots in Gujarat.Ali and 17 others were charged under the IPC and the Prevention of Terrorism Act in connection with Pandya’s murder and an earlier attempt to kill VHP worker Jagdish Tiwari. The CBI court treated both incidents as part of the same conspiracy and held a joint trial. In 2007, the court convicted 12 accused and sentenced Ali for Pandya’s murder. However, in 2011, the high court acquitted all the accused in the murder case while upholding their conviction for the attack on Tiwari, reducing their sentences to seven years.

However, in 2019, the Supreme Court overturned the HC order and convicted all 12 accused on a CBI appeal and ordered them to surrender to serve life imprisonment.In 2025, Asghar Ali requested the govt for premature release, but when the govt did not take any decision, he approached the HC. The govt informed the court that his application was under consideration, that it had received the advisory committee’s opinion, and that the matter would soon be placed before the competent authority.Justice M R Mengdey ordered, “The concerned authority shall take an appropriate decision, in accordance with law, on the application submitted by the petitioner for grant of remission, as expeditiously as possible, preferably within a period of six months from the date of receipt of the order.”Similarly, a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, Shahnawaz Bhatti, who was caught from the Kutch border in 2001 with 22kg of RDX and sentenced to life imprisonment, also sought the benefit of remission. He contended that he had spent over two decades in prison without any parole and claimed that his application had been pending for two years. The court ordered govt to consider his application too within six months.