Chandigarh, Oct 16: A Chandigarh court acquitted nine Dera Sacha Sauda followers on Friday who had been implicated in the 2011 Moga bus burning and firing incident across Punjab.
Additional Sessions Judge Arvind Kumar delivered the verdict in the high-profile case, which had been transferred to Chandigarh from Moga under directives from the Supreme Court. The original legal proceedings saw eleven total chargesheets filed following initial police FIRs concerning mob violence and the torching of a PRTC bus.
During the course of the prolonged judicial process, two of the primary accused—Mahendra Pal Bittu and Pradeep Singh—passed away. Bittu was killed inside Nabha jail during his imprisonment, while Pradeep Singh, facing separate scrutiny regarding 2015 sacrilege cases, was shot dead inside a commercial shop.
The nine individuals exonerated by the court are Sukhjinder Singh, Shakti Singh, Randeep Singh, Baljit Singh, Nishan Singh, Ranjit Singh, Narinder Sharma, Sandeep Singh, and Pirthi Singh, whose defense was represented by advocates Amar D. Kamra, Kewal Singh Brar, and Harish Chhabra.
“The police had registered the case about 15 years ago in connection with the alleged violence in Moga and the setting of a PRTC bus by a mob,” explained defense counsel Kewal Singh Brar, noting that initial investigations named unidentified individuals before arrests commenced years later following statements attributed to Mahendra Pal Bittu in 2018.
