189 People Died on Mumbai's Trains in 2006. In 2025 the High Court Acquitted Everyone

On the evening of 11 July 2006, seven bombs went off inside first-class compartments of Mumbai’s suburban trains as they pulled into stations on the Western line. The whole sequence took about eleven minutes. The bombs were built from RDX and ammonium nitrate, packed into pressure cookers and set off by quartz timers.

189 people were killed. More than 800 were injured. They were commuters going home.

In September 2015, after a trial that ran for years, a special court in Mumbai convicted twelve men. Five were sentenced to death. Seven were given life.

On 21 July 2025, the Bombay High Court acquitted all twelve. The judges found that the prosecution had, in their words, utterly failed to prove its case, and noted that even the type of bomb used had not been established. Men who had been in prison for close to nineteen years walked out.

Maharashtra appealed at once. Within days the Supreme Court stayed the High Court’s judgment so that it would not stand as a precedent in other cases, and the matter is still pending.

So here is where things stand. One hundred and eighty-nine people were murdered on their way home from work. Nineteen years later, nobody stands convicted of it, and twelve men have spent most of their adult lives in prison on a case an appellate court has now described in those terms.

Both of those sentences are true at once. That is the difficulty.

Mumbai’s long record

To see why this keeps happening, you have to look at more than one bombing.

12 March 1993. Twelve coordinated blasts across the city in a single afternoon, aimed at the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Air India building, Zaveri Bazaar, hotels and markets. More than 250 people were killed and around 700 injured. Indian investigators attributed the attack to the criminal syndicate around Dawood Ibrahim, carried out in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Masjid the previous December and the riots that followed. Yakub Memon, who financed it, was arrested in 1994 and executed in 2015, twenty-two years after the event. Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, named as the principal organisers, have never been produced before a court.

25 August 2003. Two car bombs, one at the Gateway of India and one at Zaveri Bazaar. More than fifty killed. Three people were arrested that year and sentenced to death by a special court in 2009.

11 July 2006. The train bombings described above.

13 July 2011. Three blasts within minutes of each other at Zaveri Bazaar, Opera House and Dadar, during the evening rush. More than twenty killed. Investigators suspected the Indian Mujahideen.

Zaveri Bazaar, the jewellery market in the old city, appears in that list three times.

The pattern nobody wants to name

Line the cases up and something uncomfortable is visible, and it is not about any one government or any one party. It has held across every government India has had.

The trials take decades. Twenty-two years from the 1993 blasts to Yakub Memon’s execution. Nineteen years from the 2006 bombings to an appellate judgment. Witnesses die, memories fade, and investigating officers retire long before a verdict.

The cases lean heavily on confessions taken under special laws. India has repeatedly written extraordinary anti-terror statutes, TADA in the 1990s, POTA after 2001, MCOCA in Maharashtra, that allow confessions made to police officers to be treated as evidence in ways ordinary criminal law does not permit. That makes convictions easier to obtain. It also makes them easier to attack years later, and appellate courts have done exactly that.

The people actually named as organisers are usually outside the country. They are not in the dock, so the dock fills with whoever could be reached.

And the families get nothing they can call an answer. This is the part that gets lost when the argument becomes a fight about civil liberties on one side and toughness on the other. The relatives of 189 commuters have now waited nineteen years and been told, by a High Court, that the case against the men they were told did it was not proved.

Why this is worth saying out loud

There is a temptation to treat the 2025 acquittal as a story about one flawed prosecution, or as ammunition in an argument someone was already having. It is neither.

A wrongful conviction and an unpunished bombing are not opposite failures. They are the same failure, arriving at the same address. Both mean the state did not find out who did it. Both leave the guilty free. When a case built over nineteen years collapses on appeal, the loss is not only to the men who were imprisoned. It is to every person who died on those trains, because the investigation that was supposed to answer for them has to begin again, if it begins at all, with a cold trail and dead witnesses.

The state’s job in a bombing is not to produce defendants. It is to produce proof. Those are different tasks, and India has repeatedly been better at the first.

That is not a comfortable thing for a magazine that writes about India from India’s side to print. It is printed here because the alternative, an account of Mumbai’s bombings that stops at the explosions and skips the courtrooms, would flatter nobody and help no one. The families of the dead have had enough of that.

The city, again

Mumbai’s suburban railway carries several million people every working day. It carried them the morning after 1993, the morning after 2006 and the morning after 2011, because the alternative was not going to work.

That is usually written up as resilience. It is worth being more exact. What Mumbai keeps doing is showing up, in enormous numbers, in the same crowded places, having been given no strong reason to believe the last case was solved. The city has kept its side of the bargain every single time.

The record suggests it is still owed the other half.