The country's highest court demanded that Gujarat's Hindu nationalist government remove the state's public prosecutor and, in an unprecedented move, it ordered the new trial to be held in the neighbouring west Indian state of Maharashtra.

In one of the most violent incidents during India's worst communal bloodletting for a decade, a group of Hindu men allegedly attacked the Best Bakery on March 1, 2002 with petrol bombs and daggers, killing 12 people.

The 21 men charged with the attack were acquitted by Gujarat's high court last year after 35 witnesses retracted their statements.

The Best Bakery case has come to symbolise the lack of progress in bringing to account those responsible for the riots which saw Hindu mobs rampage for weeks through Gujarat - killing more than 1,000, mostly Muslim, people.

The prosecution's star witness, 17-year-old Zaheera Sheikh, withdrew her testimony after receiving death threats from rightwing Hindus.

Ms Sheikh's father was among those who died when the Best Bakery was set ablaze by a mob. The judges directed police to give adequate protection to witnesses and relatives of the dead.

The landmark decision is also a vindication of the India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which has little real power, but which had urged the supreme court to hold a new trial outside Gujarat, saying it was "deeply concerned about the damage [being done] to the credibility of the criminal justice delivery system".

"This is a historic judgement," said Teesta Shetalvad, a human rights activist who petitioned the supreme court in connection with the sheikh case. "The supreme court has endorsed the fact that in Gujarat we have been unable to get justice because we are dealing with a public prosecutor who is ideologically affiliated to the government and judges in the state who have not given balanced judgments."

Last year Amnesty International cited a "systematic pattern of human rights violations" in Gujarat which were being carried out with the "support of the state government and institutions of the criminal justice system" and which meant there was little redress for the riot's victims.

More than 4,250 cases relating to the riots have been registered with the police. Yet in the 25 months since the riots, only a handful of people have been convicted.

K Nityanandam, a spokesman for the Gujarat government's home affairs ministry, said that the state would respect the supreme court's decision but would wait for the full judgment to be released before making further comment.

The court's verdict comes as India is heading for the polls and could well be a reminder that the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) - which rules Gujarat and heads India's federal coalition - failed to administer justice at a key moment in the country's history.

Despite the wave of violence, the BJP in Gujarat, which is led by Narendra Modi, a hardline preacher turned politician, won a landslide election in the state at the end of 2002.

However, observers say that the Supreme Court's judgment could not have come at a worse time for the party.

"The BJP has been trying to present a more caring image," said Prem Shankar Jha, a political commentator. "But the judges have posed an interesting dilemma. The question is whether the party just keeps quiet and accepts the verdict of the court or whether it promises to use parliamentary powers to override the bench."

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