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BOMBAY, Aug 8 (AFP) - The Bombay High Court on Tuesday overruled a decision to dismiss incitement-to-riot charges against India's most prominent Hindu leader Bal Thackeray. Granting an appeal by state prosecutors, Judge Vishnu Sahai said last month's ruling by a magistrate's court that the charges against Thackeray had exceeded their statute of limitation was "improper." Judge Sahai also ruled the magistrate had failed to consider the three options of granting judicial custody, police custody and bail as was required in a case based on a remand application. The decision means Thackeray should eventually stand trial before the High Court. The leader of the right-wing Shiv Sena party - the third largest partner in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's coalition government - is accused of writing inflammatory articles during 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay that left around 1,000 people dead. The state government of Maharashtra, of which Bombay is the capital, decided to prosecute Thackeray and arrested him on July 25th, as riot police took up positions across the city to prevent retaliation by Shiv Sena supporters. But Thackeray was released just hours later following the magistrate's decision that the charges were too old to be tried. In its appeal to the High Court, the prosecution had argued the period between the initial request for Thackeray's prosecution in 1994, and its sanctioning by the state government last month, should be excluded when calculating the statute of limitations. Bombay had been extremely tense in the run-up to Thackeray's arrest, amid threats by his supporters to unleash chaos on the city's streets if he was taken into police custody. |
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