Iqbal Makhdoomi, father of Malegaon blast accused Farooq Makhdoomi, arrives to meet his son at Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai on Friday. (PTI)

Mumbai, Jan. 17: Malegaon’s Muslims will press the Maharashtra chief minister tomorrow to drop the case against the nine minority community men accused in the 2006 blast in the town and, instead, punish the officers who arrested and “framed” them.

The nine, too, filed a fresh bail application today in a Mumbai court citing Swami Aseemanand’s alleged confession about Right-wing Hindu activists’ role in the explosions, which killed 31 people.

Mufti Ismail, the Independent MLA from Malegaon and imam of the powerloom town’s Jama Masjid, will arrive in Mumbai tomorrow to meet chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar.

He will ask the government to release the nine, drop the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (Mcoca) case against them, and pay compensation to them for the four and a half years they had spent in prison. Six of the nine accused are from Malegaon.

“We also want the government to act against the police officers, including then anti-terrorism squad (ATS) chief K.P. Raghuvanshi and additional superintendent Rajvardhan, and the Muslim witnesses from Malegaon who framed the nine,” Ismail told The Telegraph.

Ismail had defeated Shaikh Rasheed of the Congress and five-time MLA Nihal Ahmed of the Janata Dal (Secular) in the last Assembly polls. He will lead a team to Chavan’s residence tomorrow afternoon and hand him a memorandum.

Eight months ago, Ismail had led a team of Malegaon Muslims to Union home minister P. Chidambaram in New Delhi in connection with the case.

The bail plea of the nine accused, filed before an MCOCA court, said: “From (Aseemanand’s) confession, it is clear that those responsible for the 2006 Malegaon blasts are persons far removed from the current accused.”

It alleged that the police had forced confessions out of the accused. The court adjourned the matter to January 28 after directing the ATS and the CBI to file replies to the application.

Aseemanand’s alleged confession has prompted the CBI to start reinvestigating the September 2006 blasts. While the Maharashtra ATS had arrested the nine accused within a month of the bombings, the CBI, too, had conducted an inquiry and filed a supplementary chargesheet last year.

Last week, family members of the accused met state home minister R.R. Patil and told him the nine had been framed.

Gulzar Azmi, state general secretary of the Mumbai-based Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, which has been providing legal aid to the nine accused, said granting bail would not be enough.

“Bail will only get them out of prison but the case would continue to be heard,” he said, demanding the cases be withdrawn.

“The four years of their lives that these men spent in prison for no fault of theirs cannot be returned to them. But we want to make sure that if they are acquitted of all charges, we will file a suit against the police officers who arrested and chargesheeted them falsely,” Azmi said.

Maulana Khayyum, the Malegaon representative of the Jamiat, said: “We tried to prove the innocence of these men to senior police officers as well as the CBI and filed a petition in Bombay High Court too.”