An accused in the Bilkis case being brought to court. (PTI)

Mumbai/Ahmedabad, Jan. 18: Bilkis Bano, the pregnant Gujarat woman who was gangraped and saw her four-year-old’s head being smashed on a rock, has got justice, but from outside her home state.

Six years after the post-Godhra horror of March 2002 and two failed attempts by Gujarat courts later, a Mumbai judge today declared 12 of the 19 persons who had pounced on Bilkis’s family guilty.

The remaining seven, including five Gujarat policemen accused of shielding the culprits and a doctor duo who allegedly fudged post-mortem reports, were acquitted for lack of evidence.

The sentence is likely to be announced by additional sessions judge U.D. Salvi on Monday.

The trial was shifted to the Mumbai court in April 2004 after Bilkis, with help from the National Human Rights Commission, moved the Supreme Court saying the atmosphere in Gujarat was not conducive to a fair hearing.

This was the second time Bilkis had moved the apex court. The first was after a local court closed the case for lack of evidence. The top court then asked the CBI to take over investigations, after which the agency re-opened the case in a second Gujarat court.

The case was moved to Mumbai even as the trial was underway in the Dahod court after Bilkis, witnesses and CBI officers began getting threats from unknown persons.

Bilkis and 16 family members were chased and attacked by a mob at Chapparwad village near Randhikpur on March 3, 2002. They had fled their Limkheda taluka village days earlier as rioters had begun to close in.

The family, which initially took shelter at Chungadhi village, 6km from Randhikpur, was hounded out earlier that day. About 12 persons from the mob that got them at Chapparwad then allegedly began killing at random.

Bilkis, then 23 and five months pregnant, and three other women, including her sister, were raped. She saw the head of her four-year-old child Saliha being smashed before she was raped and left for dead after she passed out.

In all, eight persons were killed, including Bilkis’s teenaged brothers. Six have been untraced since the incident. Her husband, Saddam, and another boy, Hussain, survived.

Bilkis filed an FIR days later but the policeman who was taking down the details apparently omitted names and fudged details to protect the accused who were all believed to be influential people. The case based on the FIR was the first one dismissed for lack of evidence.

The policeman who wrote the FIR was convicted today.

“This was the person who lodged the first FIR. Since Bilkis is an illiterate woman, he took advantage and fudged the FIR, where he put in false points and deliberately omitted crucial points,” said CBI counsel and public prosecutor R.K. Shah.

“When the case based on the FIR with the local police came up for trial in a local court, it was dismissed because of inadequate evidence.”

Soon after, Bilkis began getting threats from the accused who had got away scot-free. Her family members were molested and assaulted, Shah said.

“But they could not stop her. She is a village woman of extraordinary courage.”

The 12 accused have been convicted under Section 120b (criminal conspiracy), Section 302 (murder) and Section 376 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code. They were allegedly active members of the BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal at that time.

Shailesh Bhatt, the BJP’s former Dahod district secretary, and Ramesh Chandana, the personal assistant of a minister who was then in Narendra Modi’s team, are among those convicted. The minister, Jaswant Bhabor, is still in the Gujarat team.