Mohd Shahid remembers clearly the words his father said to him as he left home in Ludhiana for Ghaziabad in April 2013. “Aaj ya toh bahar, ya hamesha ke liye andar (Either I will be out, or be imprisoned forever).” Then 17, Shahid barely understood what Mohammad Ilyas meant. Over the next 12-and-a-half years, he would be reminded of it every day.Ten days ago, the Allahabad High Court acquitted Ilyas in the 1996 Ghaziabad bus blast case, which left 18 dead – 29 years after charges were first framed against him, and 12 years after he was jailed following a life sentence. Lodged in Dasna Jail, Ilyas is yet to be released, though the family says it has submitted the required documents.Forced to start working after Ilyas’s imprisonment, Shahid, 30, took up carpentry, like his father. The work often takes him to Muzaffarnagar, the town from where Ilyas had moved to Punjab.A part of the family still lives in the Meerapur area of Muzaffarnagar, past the main bazar with its shops selling everything from sweets and clothes, to meat and auto- repair parts. A lane leads from a medical store towards what the locals refer to as the ‘Old Kotla Colony’. The colony is still registered as Ilyas’s permanent residence on some of his documents.Islamuddin, 70, among the few people who remembers Ilyas in the area, also struggles to place him – till the blast is mentioned. He gives directions to a “sheeshe wala ghar (a house with glass panels)” near a mosque.Wareena, 48, who lives at the house, says she is the wife of Ilyas’s younger brother Akhlaq. She hasn’t seen Ilyas since his arrest in 2013, she adds.Story continues below this adLike Ilyas and Shahid, Akhlaq is a carpenter and also works in Ludhiana. Wareena has heard about Ilyas’s acquittal. “My husband told me over the phone. I think it’s the first time he mentioned him in years. Ilyas and his family moved to Ludhiana in 1996 or 1997, but he used to come every month,” she says.Till 2003, when he first came out on bail following his arrest for the blast in 1996, Ilyas had a house in Muzaffarnagar. He then sold it off and, for the next 10 years, eked out a living doing carpentry work in Ludhiana, travelling to Ghaziabad for court hearings. In April 2013, came the life sentence from the trial court.Shahid, who has four sisters, says he was in Class 10 when Ilyas was sentenced. He was taken aback, the 30-year-old says. “He never talked about the case in front of us. We just knew he had a ‘case’.”With the family struggling to make ends meet, Shahid left school, started learning carpentry. “Most of the family turned us away in the initial years. Only our mama (maternal uncle) helped,” he says.Story continues below this adIlyas’s wife Bushra took up tailoring work, while one of the sisters got a job as a schoolteacher. “By 2018, we were a little stable. I was earning okay. We then started to push the lawyers for my father’s release.”That was not easy. They got their first ray of hope when, in 2023, Shahid met Danish Arbaz, a lawyer at the Allahabad High Court. “Arbaz was clear. He said there was a one in a million chance that my father would be released, but that we had to be very patient… My father was among the most patient, I don’t remember him talking much about getting out, or getting desperate.”Arbaz says there was no case against Ilyas, as no concrete evidence had ever been found. “They recovered train tickets for Jammu, where Ilyas went some weeks before the blast, to claim he was influenced by terrorists in Kashmir. Ilyas has relatives in Jammu, and he would go there regularly. That can’t be the basis of proving someone a terrorist,” says Arbaz.The blast for which Ilyas was convicted went off on a bus near the Ghaziabad bus stand on April 27, 1996, leaving 18 dead and 48 injured. The bus was travelling from Delhi to Roorkee, and Ilyas was accused of planting the bomb before it left Delhi.Story continues below this adMore than a year later, on June 8, 1997, the UP Police arrested Ilyas from Ludhiana. His statement was recorded by the investigating officer in the presence of his father Sirajuddin and brother on June 8, 1997, in which he admitted that he, along with Abdul Mateen, had planted the bomb in Delhi, before the bus set off. Apart from the rail tickets, police claimed to have recovered a diary from Ilyas as “proof”.Mateen was said to be a citizen of Pakistan, and Ilyas’s co-conspirator. Police said the Rajasthan Police had arrested Mateen under the Foreigners’ Act, for being in India without proper immigration papers.In 2013, the trial court convicted Ilyas and Mateen of murder, criminal conspiracy, and under the Explosive Substances Act, but acquitted another accused Tasleem, who was alleged to be a “go-between”.As per a report by The Indian Express at the time, the Ghaziabad court took note of Mateen’s admission that “long ago, I had developed a new technique to generate electricity by properly utilising the laws of physics”. “… if a man can generate electricity, he can make a bomb with ease”,” the court held.Story continues below this adThe Express also reported that, during the trial, Ilyas denied making a confession.As per another Indian Express report, Mateen was also sentenced to life in a terror case in Rajasthan, but was acquitted in cases lodged against him in Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. Police said they had arrested Mateen from Anantnag in J&K, and that he had confessed” to involvement in several blasts.Exclusive | As cracks emerged in terror module, Umar Nabi skipped co-conspirator’s wedding but rushed to Kashmir later to mend bridgesIn its November 10 order acquitting Ilyas, the Allahabad High Court noted that the railway ticket and diary seized from him did not prove his involvement in the blast. The court said Ilyas’s confession was not admissible either, as it was recorded only before police. While this was accepted while the TADA Act was still in place, the court pointed out that the provision had lapsed by the time of the 1996 blast.“The TADA Act was allowed to lapse in 1995 due to allegations of misuse, and as the present offence was registered on 27.04.1996 i.e. after 1995, when provisions of TADA Act were lifted… the confession recorded by (a) Senior Police Officer at the time of investigation cannot be permitted to be proved under the law,” the Division Bench of Justice Siddharth and Justice Ram Manohar Narayan Mishra said.Story continues below this adAbout the prosecution witnesses, the court noted that “they have outrightly disowned their statements”.They added that they were acquitting Ilyas with a “heavy heart”, and slammed the prosecution for “miserably failing to prove the charges”. About Tasleem, the court said no state or government appeal appears to have been filed against his acquittal, while “no information could be brought on record as to whether… Mateen has filed any criminal / jail appeal against impugned judgment and order”.Shahid says they are waiting for Ilyas to come home. “We have submitted the papers… My uncle and my mother are in Meerut. They will receive him and bring him to Ludhiana. It’s the first time he will meet my wife,” says Shahid.He got married a year ago.