Raghuvir Pandya, the state prosecutor in Zahira Sheikh's case, has been widely criticized for failing to aggressively cross-examine the witnesses who recanted. The portly, disheveled lawyer said public prosecutors cannot push witnesses too hard.
"If you put some hardness on the witnesses," he said, "they could complain to the government."
Iqbal Ahmed Ansari, a local Muslim businessman who aided Zahira Sheikh's family before she disappeared, called for the intervention of India's federal government, which is also controlled by Hindu nationalists. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee leads the largest nationalist party but is generally seen as more moderate.
Where Sheikh is and why she changed her story remain a mystery.
Hindu neighbors said they remembered Sheikh as a friendly young woman. They said her father died of a heart attack a month before the attack.
Piyush Patel, one of the police officials at the scene of the bakery fire, said Sheikh had been crying hysterically when he arrived.
Her mother, who was more composed, named nine of their Hindu neighbors as part of the mob. The police did not arrive at the scene for 12 hours after the fire.
Ansari, the businessman, said he took Sheikh, the youngest child in the family, to identify the disfigured bodies of her sister and uncle at the local hospital.
In the months after the attack, Sheikh seemed to come into her own, he said. She gave interviews to journalists and then testifying before various commissions, including India's widely respected National Human Rights Commission, and her girlish face became a symbol of the horror of the riots.
Her family also began to benefit financially, Muslim leaders said. Receiving aid from Muslim charity groups as well as payments from the state and national governments, they lived in various donated homes.
But the houses Ansari described all sounded smaller than the living quarters that were part of the spacious three-story family bakery. The charred building lies in ruins today, but it appears to have been one of the finest homes in a lower-middle-class neighborhood filled with Hindu families.
Today, looters have torn out every window, door and electrical cable and a family of pigs has bedded down on the first floor.
A half-mile from the scorched bakery, Mahender Jadhav, one of the freed defendants, sat in his house on Monday and hailed the verdict. He said Zahira Sheikh was now finally telling the truth.
"What can I say? These people came from outside," said Jadhav, 26, who owns a scooter repair shop. "I was at home. I don't know."
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