MUMBAI, April 24 -- The diametrically opposite "stories" put forth by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) "lead nowhere", and the witnesses proposed by the NIA were "mostly hearsay witnesses," the Bombay High Court observed in its order discharging the four accused arrested by the federal agency in the September 2006 Malegaon bomb blasts case. While the court discharged the four accused on Wednesday, the judges' observations were made in a detailed order, which became available on Thursday. The division bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Shyam C Chandak quashed a September 2025 special court order that had framed charges against Rajendra Chaudhary, Dhan Singh, Manohar Ram Singh Narwaria, and Lokesh Sharma. They said the trial NIA court should not have discarded the ATS case merely on the basis of the charge-sheets subsequently filed by the National Investigation Agency against an altogether different set of accused individuals. It was required to reconcile the conclusions drawn by the two investigating agencies - the ATS and CBI, which first probed the case, and the NIA, which took over the case in 2011. The bench added that the NIA, instead of conducting a further investigation, merely re-recorded statements of some of the accused individuals arrested by the ATS, and some ATS case witnesses, instead of collecting additional material. "There seems to be no answer in law as to how the trial judge can deal with the materials collected by the ATS, which implicates another set of accused persons," the bench said. "The case seems to have reached a dead end," it added....