and notable witness. She stated that she saw a large mob set fire to their bakery and saw them burn her family members to death. When the mob gathered, shouting communal slogans, her family fled to the terrace and some locked themselves in a first-floor room. The Sheikh family lived in a house directly above the bakery. The mob set the bakery on fire and killings continued from 6 pm to 10 am the next day, a period of sixteen hours. Her statements were recounted for many publications. However, as per documents presented to the court, Zaheera's FIR was registered by the Gujarat Police|police on 4 March 2002, leading the defence to oppose its use and the judge to suspect its validity and the possibility of it having been doctored by the police to implicate innocent people at the expense of the guilty perpetrators. The defence purported that only the FIR that was registered on FIR of 1 March 2002 (by Raizkhan Amin Mohammed Pathan) should be admissible under Section 60 of the Indian Evidence Act. Further, in court on 23 March 2003, as many as 37 of the 73 witnesses, including Sheikh, turned hostile. It was later alleged by their former mentors that they had received threats to their lives, including from Madhu Shrivastav. Other witnesses gave garbled and self-contradictory witness account, strikingly at variance with the lucid, grammatical and logical written affidavits which had previously been filed in their name. The prosecution claimed that these witnesses had suffered head injuries and were not in a mental state to give an accurate account of their experiences, but could not explain the lucidity of the affidavits. The state government pointed to the lapses by the Gujarat Police in "registering and recording of FIR" (First Information Report) and on the part of the prosecution in "recording of evidence" of witnesses in the Best Bakery case. As a result of all these, the prosecution's case collapsed in court and all of the 21 accused were acquitted. The judgment was delivered on 27 June 2003 by additional sessions judge Hemantsinh U Mahida of the Vadodara fast track court. The judgment said, "It was proved beyond doubt that a violent mob had attacked the bakery and killed 12 persons. However, there was no legally acceptable evidence to prove that any of the accused presented before the court had committed the crime." The judgment was