Chapter one
Ehtesham Kutubuddin Siddiquy, Accused No 4
Case: 7/11 Mumbai local train attack MCOCA Special Case No.21/2006 Case: Fake encounter Wadala August 22, 2006
Police obstructing justice and destroying evidence and thieving
There are two cases in which Ehtesham K Siddiquy is trapped. One is the serial bomb blasts in local trains in Mumbai on July 11, 2006 where he along with Asif Bashir Khan alias Junaid alias Abdulla and Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rehman Shaikh is accused of planting bombs. But on April 25, 2013 Bharti Airtel officer appeared in the court with phone records that showed that he was not at the site of the blasts. (1)The three were either at their work place or at home. Ehtesham was at Mira Road the whole day on 7/11. The other case is that he is a witness to a fake encounter that took place in Wadala, Mumbai, where the police killed one Mohammad Ali believed to be a Pakistani on August 22, 2006. Ehteshan had seen him in Kala Chowki office of ATS. (2)
On August 3, 2013 the jail authorities of Arthur Road took Ehtesham Siddiquy to Kurla court. In his absence the current Superintendent Gond Patil, former Superintendent Swati Sathe currently Additional Director General of Police Maharashtra and ATS officer entered the barracks. They searched Ehtesham’s belongings and spread his papers, then picked up a file, his daily journal and items of everyday use. As they were doing it a fellow accused in the same case Sajid Ansari and other inmates objected to them Patil said that he would return them soon. On his return from Kurla court Ehtesham filed a complaint in the MCOCA court, to the police station at NM Joshi Marg and to the chief secretary of Home department complaining disappearance of important documents including the charge sheet on the fake encounter. He was preparing his defense in the continuing trial in court of the case of the fake encounter of Mohammad Ali, a Pakistani. Ehtesham had seen the Pakistani Mohammad Ali in Kala Chowki headquarters of Anti Terrorism Squad of Maharashtra. Subsequently Mohammad Ali was killed in the fake encounter on August 22, 2006 in Wadala, Mumbai.
Ehtesham appealed to the MCOCA court to order inquiry in the case and requested the court to recover his documents including the charge sheet in the fake encounter on which he was preparing his argument. He requested the NM Joshi marg police station to register a case of theft and conspiracy against the jail authorities. Furthermore he appealed to the principal secretary of Home department to stop the jail authorities from entering his barrack in his absence and searching his belongings. In the court the government prosecutor Raja Thakre argued that Ehtesham should complain against the jail authorities and not against the prosecution.
In the fake encounter case he had prepared some points in defense argument for his sake when he would be presented in the court. He now complains that the jail authorities have hatched a conspiracy and taken away his papers to show to the prosecution how to prepare to counter his argument and thus weaken the defense case. He had meticulously prepared point by point how to defend his argument that he had seen the Pakistani Mohammad Ali whom the ATS were questioning before they killed him in the fake encounter on August 22, 2006.
Points to note
On September 8, 2006 four bombs exploded in Malegaon. At that precise time there was a man called Mohammad Ali Shaikh present in the Kurla ATS office. The news channel showed the scenes of explosions in Malegaon. Just at that moment an ATS officer killed in 26/11 along with Hemant Karkare, Vijay Salaskar and another police officer Maeykar PI greeted the news with great joy and remarked that the Bajrang Dal had taken revenge in Malegaon for the train blasts in Mumbai on 7/11.(3) This Mohammad Ali Shaikh is different from the Pakistani the ATS had killed on August 22, 2006. Mohammad Ali Shaikh was falsely accused in the Malegaon blasts of September 8, 2006 and also in 7/11. He has been given bail in Malegaon case but not in 7/11. He was questioned in the night of November 10, 2006 at his house in Shivajinager Govandi in Mumbai. Next day on November 11, the police arrested him and slapped terrorism charges on him of his involvement in Malegaon 2006 blasts. (4)
This rigmarole in framing innocent Muslims shows that the Mohammad Ali killed in Wadala fake encounter was from Pakistan but the police found an Indian Muslim with that name to bear the cross of guilt. When arrested Mohammad Ali sheikh was 37 years old salesman living with wife Saidunisa and children.
For the same case of 7/11 the ATS arrested 13 men but two years later the Crime Branch arrested five Indian Mujahideen and charged them.
Ehtesham had filed 1500 RTI applications of which 400 deal with 7/11. He says: "I asked for the minutest of details—date of arrest, place where we were kept, platforms on which the trains had halted. Initially, the replies were vague; today our defence case stands on the information gathered under the Act." This shows that he was innocent and had to struggle so hard for gathering proof for his acquittal. "Earlier, even when we screamed out loud that we were innocent, no one listened to us. Today, we are backing it with evidence." "I am putting these years in jail to good use. Life in prison can bring out the worst in a person. If the mind is not channeled into doing something constructive, the strongest of men can break down."
Police strategy
The police in India are wont to arrest innocent Muslims and falsely charge them in multiple cases of terrorism. This strategy makes it difficult for the victims to come out of prison for years on end and even after a decade.
Grave and cataclysmic indications
Ashish Khaitan has appealed through his letter to the high court in Maharashtra about what he pertinently claims: “My research has shown that at least in three cases prosecuted by ATS Maharashtra, namely the July 11 2006 Mumbai local train blasts, the 2006 Malegaon Blasts and the Pune German Bakery case of February 2010, the ATS has deliberately created bogus evidence, extracted false confessions by the most inhuman torture, planted explosives in the houses of the accused and thus implicated innocent Muslim youth.”(5) What he has not taken into notice is even more disturbing namely that the director general of police of Maharashtra Dr Pasricha had claimed that behind the serial bomb blasts of July 11, 2006 there was a Maharashtrian leader and behind the September 8, 2006 blasts in Malegaon were the activists of Bajrang Dal. No one heeded this remark he made in public on September 9, 2006. A Marathi newspaper called Punnynagri dated September 11, 2006 referred this only to castigate and scorn Dr PS Pasricha as bejabaddar police pramaukh “irresponsible police chief.” This writer has a copy of it and he has guessed that leader to be either Bal Thackeray or Sharad Pawar. His ground of suspicion is that the two were cronies and were the only leaders who called shots in the state in the nineties of the last century and the first decade of the 21st century. For example it was Thackeray who exhorted Hindus on January 6 1993 to retaliate to Muslims in Mumbai [Bombay, then] which led to manslaughter of the minority community people in the city and in the first decade of 21st century he time and again expressed need for suicide bomber squads of Hindus to take on the Muslims. Pawar was the defence minister at that time and through his intervention Madhukar Saroptdar was not arrested although he was caught with arms he was supplying to the Shiv Sainiks to kill Muslims. What is even more remarkable is that the then Chief Minister Sudhakar Naik had blamed Pawar for the blood bath in Mumbai and it was again Pawar who managed to invite Saroptdar to meet the Prime Minister Narsimha Rao who toured the city at that time. So the question arises as to who is ultimately responsible for the arrest of Ehtesham and others? Only the police???
The editorial in the Marathi newspaper also describes that there was a move in the Maharashtra legislative assembly on breach of privileges against Dr Pasricha. If the Maharashtra government were serious in fighting terrorism they should have asked the police chief to furnish proof of the Maharashtrian leader behind the train blasts and Bajrang Dal’s involvement in Malegaon 2006 blasts. The government included Congress and Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar members. For both the attacks Ehtesham and other Muslims had to languish in prison and are still doing it with justice clearly denied to them.
It is in this context it is relevant to quote Khaitan, “I am aware that normally, investigation of crime is the task of the police and verdicts of guilt or innocence, the realm of courts. What makes me intervene in this process is the fact that the same has become the reverse of what it is intended to be. When the police deliberately obstructs justice and misleads courts of law, it cannot be left unchecked.” The gravamen of the situation is that “None of these agencies [ATS, Crime Branch of Mumbai and others] placed the entire relevant material before the MCOCA court trying an entirely unconnected set of 13 men for 7/11 Blasts. Why?”
Was the Maharashtrian leader really involved so powerful to derail investigation? Who is he?
Eshtesham was arrested a month after 7/11 blasts. His arrest in August 2006 indicates that he belongs to the 13 accused in the blasts. They were accused by ATS under KP Raghuvanshi. But then Hemant Karkare replaced Raghuvanshi and remarked on August 16, 2008 that he had not come across SIMI involvement in any case. (6) It proves that the thirteen arrested for 7/11 were innocent Muslims framed on deliberate false charges. Ehtesham was arrested in August 2006 and was one of the 13.
There serious and worrisome implications of this. One that according to Malegaon 2006 blasts accused Abrar Ahmed Raghuvanshi had tried to bribe him into owning his involvement in return he would get fabulous amount of money, land and flats and assurance that he would be bailed out. Suboth Kumar Jaiswal was Raghuvanshi’s assistant and Sachin Kadam of ATS and Malegaon ASP Rajwardhan visited Abrari on September 1, 2008 and told him that they would remove the new investigators [Karkare and his assistants]who were changing the investigation that Raghuvanshi had done and then they would take Abrar out of jail after two and half months. Thus Karkare was assassinated according to this deep conspiracy and Raghuvanshi succeeded Karkare who died on November 26, 2008. It was therefore Raghuvanshi who turned the investigation to the 13 accused who were already in jail for two years. But the new set of 5 Indian Mujahideen with Sadiqu Shaikh were arrested in 2008 by the Crime Branch and supposed to be real bombers of 7/11. The farce that the ATS and MCOCA court is conducting is trying the 13 (including Ehtesham) who were not really involved.
Consequences: Raghuvanshi could not win over Abrar accused in September 8 2006 blasts who turned hostile and renounced his being an approver but Raghuvanshi got Sadiqu discharged from the earlier case of July 11, 2006 serial blasts in the trains. This is an excellent game that Raghuvanshi and RR Patil the Home Minister played, the game that Khaitan calls “pick and choose” terrorists. These worthies are like the police officer inspector Thomas in Arundhati Roy’s novel God of Small Things who tapped the breasts of a woman while accusing her of adultery with his baton as if he was picking and choosing mangoes from a cart in market!
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(1) http://www.indianexpress.com/news/we-weren-t-on-the-trains.../1111537/0
(2) Inquilab Friday August 16, 2013.
3) Inquilab Sunday magazine August 17, 2008.
(4)Sunday Express, Mumbai edition November 6, 2011.
(5) http://gulail.com/ashish-khetan-petitions-before-the-bombay-high-court/
(6) Urdu Times August 16, 2008.
Chapter two
Case: 7/11 Mumbai local train attack
Fahim Arshad Ansari
Acquittal with a trail of serious deliberation
Fahim Arshad Ansari was arrested on February 12, 2008 for the attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur, UP. He along with Sabbaudin was also charged with providing important details of location in Mumbai of strategic buildings and sites for possible terrorist attacks by Lashka-r-Toiba. Such locations included offices of Mumbai Police Commissioner, Director General of Police, Gateway of India, Colaba, Tajmahal hotel, Churchgate railway station, Reliance energy and AKSA beach. (1)Judge ML Tahilani of Mumbai high court dismissed the charges because Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan were directed to remain in VT now known as CST. (2) Ismail Khan was killed and Kasab was shot at and injured and was hanged in 2013. The judge also laughed away the prosecution presenting a hand drawn map of the sites in the handwriting of Fahim when better and accurate maps by Google Earth with GPS and VoIP were used by the handlers of the terrorist attackers. This is a serious flaw in the investigation because it proves the involvement of the police in Mumbai in framing innocent educated Muslim youths in terror charges. Fahim lived in Goregaon and his own city’s police framing him is a betrayal. The judge had closely ascertained from Kasab and found that Kasab and Ismail Khan were not instructed to go to Chowpatty or the Gateway of India and some other places. It shows up the Mumbai police added names of location according to the whim and calculation in framing the Muslim youths. The leading public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam acted like cock of the walk in presenting the case and collecting huge amount of money as his fees.
The Maharashtra government had appealed against the high court verdict but the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal in August 2012. A year later Fahim is still languishing in the Bareilly court for his alleged involvement in the Rampur attack. To fight the case his wife Yasmin had to sell her flat in Bandra.
The facts of arrest
Fahim was actually arrested on February 1st, 2008 from Lucknow and for an hour was kept in Lok chowky police station in that city. The Special Task Force shifted him from there to an unknown place and kept him in a bungalow for fifteen days. (3)
Torture and forced false confession
His hands were handcuffed in chain and tied to a place. The police prevented him from sleep except for two to three hours and tortured him. They forced him to make maps of Mumbai with locations marked. They also tortured him into signing blank papers. They even threatened to kill him in fake encounter. Once they took him to a farm at night with his head covered in black cloth. They pointed their guns at him and ordered him to run. The premonition of imminent death in encounter scared him so much that he burst out weeping and crying. Then they told him that if he did what they wanted they would not kill him. Thereafter he did three things they subsequently told him to do: one, they prepared fictitious stories of involvement in terror and asked him to sign, two, draw maps of Mumbai and , three, blank papers he was told to sign. He did what they told. This went on for ten days.
Then the police took him to Rampur in the morning of February 10th and kept him in an unknown place. At 5 in the evening they presented him in court where the lady judge did not ask him anything and sent him to remand. At 7 that evening he was put in jail where four others were also present he did not know them. They took away all his belongings including clothes, watch, mobile, etc. On February 11th the ATS of UP visited the Rampur prison and took him away for remand. The police tortured him excruciatingly and on February 16 they transferred him to a police station in Dadar (East), Mumbai. The Maharashtra ATS questioned him and took him to his house in Mumbai and allowed him just a minute to see his daughter and then took him away. On the same day they presented him before ATS chief Hemant Karkare and another officer Pram Vir Singh in the Nagpada police station.
On February 16th ATS chief Hemant Karkare thoroughly questioned him for several hours. He scrutinized his past record and also cross checked him from all angles and remarked that Fahim was not involved in any crime in Mumbai or Maharashtra and hence he should be sent back to Rampur. He was locked up in Rampur jail on February 18th. 2008. In the meantime Karkare was assassinated on November 26, 2008 during the Mumbai attacks. A year after Fahim was presented before Karkare the ATS now under KP Raghuvanshi framed him in Mumbai 2008 attacks case. For a whole year he was in Rampur jail! And yet Raghuvanshi did that!
In April 2008 he was presented in Rampur court. He told the judge that he was tortured and abused and his mother and sister were also abused in the filthiest language by the police and how the STF coerced him into signing confession and almost killed him in a fake encounter for that. But the judge did not take any notice of this.
Important facts for notice
Even after Karkare had cleared him of the charge of any involvement in terrorism, Raghuvanshi deliberately implicated him in 26/11 case. This he did despite the fact that David Coleman Headley had confessed that it was he who surveyed Mumbai strategic sites for attack and the FBI even questioned Fahim and Sabauddin for several hours. Even so the Maharashtra government not only reinstated RR Patil as home minister after the 26/11 attacks but reappointed Raghuvanshi as ATS chief and continued to promote him. Raghuvanshi is now the police commissioner of Thane.
But there are some facts which Fahim has said that provide ‘critical mass’ indicating a much deeper conspiracy and involvement of several governments and even the judiciary which fail to give justice to Muslims and where do we go from here. That leaves no option but the necessity for International Criminal Court or the UNO to help India surmount the morass of disaffection of the minority and bias of its police and the misguidance of the majority community as far as who the real terrorists are. One, the FBI of America did not find the involvement of Fahim in 26/11 attacks and hence he was not named in their charge sheet. Therefore the onus is and should be on the governments of Maharashtra and the central government to question Raghuvanshi why did he require Fahim who was again brought back to Mumbai by the Crime Branch on December 17, 2009? Second, there was no business of Fahim drawing maps because the matter of the map was not included in trial until February 5th, 2009. Till then he had been given remand four times and appeared in court several times and yet there was no mention of the map. Why ? Who planted the map in Ismail Khan’s pocket? There was no dirt mark of mud, blood and sweat on it. Nor was the map even folded! This is unbelievable because Ismail Khan was killed in a battle that lasted for so many hours since the attacks started! Third, why did Justice ML Tahaliani not question Kasab in the presence of Fahim when the Pakistani terrorist had at long last confessed his crimes on July 20, 2009? Anyway FBI had questioned him thoroughly. The Judge had asked Kasab in camera about Fahim. Kasab drew a blank, he did not know him. The Judge was surprised but why did he not take it on record?
There are even more disturbing features. If the Rampur police excessively tortured him into drawing maps of Mumbai in February 2008 was it not a sinister case of conspiracy? There seem to be two groups who struck Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Kasab and his handlers already had Google Earth maps and locations marked. This group did not know the other group to which the police wanted maps from Fahim. This latter group probably spoke Marathi and assassinated Karkare. The police commissioner Hasan Gafoor had called Karkare to his control room while Rakesh Maria told him to report to his. If Malegaon blasts of 2006 accused Abrar is telling truth in his affidavit then Suboth Kumar Jaiswal and other officers of police with him were behind removing Karkare from their path because Karkare was changing the findings of the group of his predecessor Raghuvanshi. This is beyond the competence of the court to find and hence it is likely that it would remain an unsolved mystery surrounding the conspiracy.
But there is another that also defies solution. Fahim’s wife Yasmin had told him in prison that his lawyer Shahid Azmi was under threat. The ATS had threatened to kill him if he continued his defense of Fahim. He even stopped going court out of fear. Was Shahid assassinated for having defended Fahim and would have defended other accused in false terrorism cases? So also will remain it a mystery that David Headley had reconnoitered the sites of attack and yet the police went after Fahim precisely for that reason. It reminds one of the other mysteries that Headley had not found Ishrat Jahan as a terrorist but the Gujarat police went ahead and even killed her, etc.
Fahim in his letter from jail written in March 2010 says that he was not acquitted because the media, the judge and the government had trapped him in the false case. The first investigation officer Ashok T Duraphe came for a short time to meet him. Fahim wept and told him that he had nothing to do with 26/11. Duraphe told him hamen pata hai ki tera(Fahim Ansari) ka is hamley sey koi taaluk nahin hay. Par ham tujhe aisey hi nahin chod saktey. Tera naam akhbar and tv men itna aagya hai ki abb kutch nahin ho sakta. Iss case men tu phans gya hai. “We know that you (Fahim Ansari) have no connection with this attack. But we cannot leave you, nevertheless. Your name has been so much in the newspapers and on TV that we are helpless. You have been trapped.”
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(1)
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/fbi-wants-to-quiz-fahim-ansari-for-2611-terror-strikes/417766/0
(2)
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/1378515/report-fahim-sabauddin-s-release-punctures-mumbai-police-claims#
(3) This version of his arrest and other quotes of Fahim are from his letter from prison published in Urdu Times dated March 8, 2010. See the facsimile of the letter attached.
Chapter 4
The classic case of deliberate arrest of two brothers for mistaken identity
Mohammad Zahid Abdul Majid and Javed Abdul Majid
One of the most bizarre cases of deliberate framing of two brothers in terrorism charges has permanently soured relationship of father with the disobedient one. The apple of his eyes is in jail for the last seven years but the expelled and forsaken is out on bail after having spent five years in prison.
On the day Indian government of PM AB Vajpayee banned Students Islamic Movement of India the police inspector in charge of City Police Station in Malegaon Hansraj detained Javed Abdul Majid on the false charge of giving a speech in Bhiku chowk against the ban to instigate the public against the government. Earlier in the year five youths of Malegaon were pasting posters for the recovery of the demolished Babri mosque. The police had chased them away. But one of them Mudassir was caught. He along with Zahid and the other three were members of SIMI. Mudassir knew Zahid by the name of Javed and gave this name to the police. The name of Zahid was recorded in police diary as Javed. On the day Zahid was pasting posters his younger brother Javed reprimanded him. Javed scolded his elder brother Zahid for playing with fire on the issue of Babri mosque for it would hardly change the situation. It would not serve any purpose, either.
The participation of Zahid in SIMI activities brought the police to the door of their house in Islampura. As Majid also had admonished his son Zahid not to get involved in SIMI he became furious and lost his balance and drove his elder son Zahid out of the house and forbade him from entering the lane in which the house was located. Even when Zahid was released on bail in the bomb blasts case of September 8, 2006 his father did not relent. Zahid had to go back to Phoolsanghvi, Yawatmal, where he used to perform namaz as an imam.
Javed had not given any speech though his elder brother Zahid was involved in SIMI activities. His father Majid was a responsible man in his personal and civil life. As a teacher in a village he had worked with Marathi teachers in a mixed school where majority of the students were Hindus. He had celebrated the Independence Day and the Republic Day in a rare spirit of national unity. He would organize rangolee decoration of the school ground. The non Muslim teachers were impressed by his civility and togetherness. He would also organize tours and would enjoy the outing with his family participating in the educational excursions. That abruptly ended his carefree contentment in family life and satisfaction in his métier for good when the police woke him at 2 am on May 12, 2006.
Majid’s niece had got married on May 11, 2006. He was busy in arranging the wedding dinner till late in the night and returned home very tired. The police surprised him and disturbed the family greatly when they knocked at 2 am in the wee hours of May 12th. They ordered him to bring his son Javed, the SIMI activist. Zahid and not Javed was the SIMI activist he argued with the arresting officer. He had already expelled from house his son Zahid for being a member of SIMI and where was he (Zahid) the father did not know and had never cared to know because Zahid had disobeyed him. So the poor father had to surrender Javed the younger son for the misdeed of the elder. Neither the father nor the son knew why the police had arrested Javed. It was in the court that Javed came to know that the police had slapped the charge of the arms haul case familiarly known as the Aurangabad arms haul case against him. Majid was aghast with the shock! (Listen to the interview of Majid given to the MilliGazette on August 21, 2013.)
Zahid
Javed
Majid
Rokayya, mother of Javed and Zahid
Chapter 5
Abhinav Bharat, not banning it: a step into the dark abyss
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ letter of July 2013 made public on August 22, 2013 has come as a shock. The MHA refused to ban the Hindutva extremist terror outfit Abhinave Bharat as the Government of Maharashtra had appealed it to do. According to the first published report it considers AB as only “a ginger movement.” It would imply that its involvement in Malegaon 2008 blast was carefully calculated and the blast was carried out to cause limited harm. Six people lost their life and more than a hundred were injured at the Bhiku chowk, Malegaon, on Septermber 29, 2008.
This flies in the face of reason. Soon after the bomb blew up Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur rang up Ramji Kalsangra.
Sadhvi: How many have died in the explosion?
Ramji: Two or three have died.
Sadhvi : You had calculated many would die when you went there.
Ramji: There was some mistake in the timing. We tried to park the motor bike at two or three places but we were not allowed there. Then we parked at one place and I left the spot. There was not a huge crowd then. There was so much explosive material that the front part of the vehicle was blown to smithereens.
Of course they did calculate to cause maximum deaths because their chosen spot was the so called Nukad corner but such was the crowd that there was no possibility of carrying it that far. The local people at the Bhiku chowk said that the Ramji had tried to go into the crowd of women but the lady police did not allow him. Twice the lady officer turned him back. The barricade was manned by the lady police. In fact it was also difficulty for any man to enter the thick crowd of women and to carry a vehicle was unthinkable. Then the owner of the transport company asked his servant to remove the bike. But the handle was locked so he sent his servant to the police chowki across the road but the cops dilly dallied. One of them came to the vehicle but refused to remove the vehicle because the handle was locked. The people who gathered around then used their muscles and disturbed the focus of the box containing the bomb. The worshippers would come out of the big mosque after prayer for tea and snack every night at 9.30. But that was the special night for appealing to god for special prayer. The crowd was held back because of the special lengthy prayer for half an hour. So the casualty figure was less on account of the accidental delay which the terrorists failed to take into consideration. How did then the ministry think it was calculated to cause limited harm?
Second nefarious argument of the ministry was that AB movement was a reaction to Jihad terrorism. This cannot be a justification or extenuating of the serious charge against it or the possibility of future resurgence of the movement. What the central government ministry is doing now is what Chief Minister Narendra Modi did on February 27, 2002 night. His Newtonian third law ushered in the pogroms of Muslim from which he has not retracted till this day. In 2007 interview with Karan Thapar he gnashed his teeth boiling with rage at the media czar and in subdued voice he remarked that only one or two persons hold the view that he was a mass murderer and abruptly truncated the interview. He did not accept even the traditional skull cap during the sadhbhauvna farce. To a foreign channel in July 2013 he uttered kutte ke bache the litters of dogs and bitches to describe Muslims. Therefore there is cause of concern to look at AB and Modi government sponsored terrorism against Muslims as of the same nature. Modi government had had a wont to frame Muslims in false charges of terrorism, not once but for umpteen times.. Abhinav Bharat and the phenomenon of Modi RSS pracharak as ruler of Gujarat are manifestations of the same extremism of the right wing fundamentalism and hatred against Muslims.
A fuller perception of what had happened in Malegaon earlier attack of 2006 and other places clearly indicates the involvement of the extremist Hindutva organization AB. The hallmark of the AB is that whenever they struck, the innocent Muslims were accused in the media, the media trial and publicity of them went on for weeks together and they in the eyes of the public were made to bear the cross of ignominy and later framed in bogus terror charges by the police as in the case of Fahim Ansari in 26/11 and the nine accused in Malegaon 2006 blasts. Other cases piled up like the German Bakery case where without proof of actual involvement of Mirza Himayat Baig, he was sentenced to death nevertheless. The stage was set much earlier when the National Democratic Alliance government in control of the Hindu party BJP through its ordinance banned Students Islamic Movement of India on February 18, 2001 as it tried to piggy ride the US war on terrorism. There was no involvement of any Muslim from India in the 9/11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon but within a week in an unseemly hurry the government of Atal B Vajpayee banned SIMI. This is in sharp contrast with the governmental refusal to ban AB even after its manifest Constitution became public, its commitment, its seditious attempt to overthrow the government and its association with the Israeli and Nepalese governments in real acts of terror.
The MHA must not be surprised to know that their getting Zabiuddin Ansari and Abdul Karim Tunda extradited from the Gulf countries by way of Nepal also applies to the terrorists like Lt Col Prasad Purohit whose crimes cannot remain just a “ginger movement”. (1)Purohit and other accused in Malegaon 2008 blast had sought steady supply of weapons, diplomatic recognition from Israel, safe haven in Tel Aviv etc., and training in arms from Nepalese army as per AB’s understanding with the members of royal family of Nepal.(2) As Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and tried him in Israel in 1961on grounds that “universal jurisdiction” based on “universal nature of the crimes in question” and "grave offenses against the law of nations itself “entitles it to try and punish the Nazi leader who had committed the crimes even when Israel had not come into existence and even the Genocide Convention had not come into effect. Israel came in existence in 1948 and the Genocide Convention in 1951. This precedence is applicable not only to Purohit but also Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Their acts during their tenure in military service and in office as Chief Minister respectively cannot be called “ginger movement”. In the case of Modi no other than the Supreme Court had dubbed him as a modern day Nero in 2004. He had toured affected areas in the evening of February 28th 2002. Babu Bajrangi and the Charra community told the Tehelka reporter that Modi had exhorted them to continue their killing the next day (Tehelka November 2007). In the case of Charles Taylor the Supreme Court of Sierra Leon ruled that "the sovereign equality of states does not prevent a Head of State from being prosecuted before an international criminal tribunal or court." If India can arrest members of Menon family like Yakub Menon from Nepal to stand trial for terrorism in India it also applies to the terrorists within India according to hostes humani generis ('enemies of the human race') principle of international jurisprudence. Even Henry Kissinger accepted that heads of states and public officials are on par with the pirates and other outlaws before the global bar of justice for breaking laws against humanity. (3)
Indian courts may not regard the crimes of Modi or Purobit as grave violations of either the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide or crimes against humanity or crimes against nations. Therefore the need for foreign intervention based on international bar of justice. If Eichmann was an ideologue of Nazism then the RSS paracharak or propagandist Narendra Modi carried out the Hindutva experiment of purging Muslims according to the philosophy that RSS ideologue Guru Golwalkar espoused in emulation of Nazism. The collector of Godhra had declared that the fire in S6 compartment of Sabarmati Express train was an accident Modi in the night of February 27, 2002 changed it into an attack by ISI and Lashka-re-Toiba. Even he gave a call for strike the next day and allowed his police to let Hindus take revenge upon the Muslims for three days. It was like Adolf Hitler getting the German parliament burnt down and blaming it on the communists and the Jews as enemies of Germany behind it. The police blamed the Ganchi Muslims of Godhra for the train incident and even accused Maulana Umarji as the mastermind. He was acquitted by the court and the innocent people were convicted on what clearly appears to be false charges of terrorism. Since then Modi has also been involved in fake encounters which also constitute grave crimes against humanity. If the Israeli kidnapped Eichmann from South America the Gujarat police by the approval of Modi kidnapped Sohrabuddin, his wife and friend Tulsiram Prajapati, Ishrat Jahan and three others from Mahrasthra and Kashmir and killed them. The Gujarat kidnapping was from different states of the Union of India like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, UP, etc. Indian courts have failed in catching on the idea of the “extraordinary renditions” Purohit also had a North Eastern rebel leader brought to Delhi. He killed him and let the dead body slide into the gutter. What is even more disturbing for democracy, Purohit had been complicit with the ruling monarchy in Nepal in their fight against the Maoist insurgency. He wanted to kill RSS leader Indresh Kumar who supported the democracy movement in the neighbouring country and for other ulterior reasons. These acts of terror of the most active and the mind behind the Abhinav Bharat cannot be called as “ginger movement.” Moreover he had trained activists of Bajrang Dal and RSS in arms and assembling of bombs and even supplied RDX and bombs. If the government in Delhi does not still want to ban the Abhinav Bharat it is their outlook. But international jurisdiction takes note of it all the same. It also takes note of the fact that the high officials like ADG of police PP Pandy in Gujarat and chief of Anti Terrorism Squad of Maharashtra KP Raghuvanshi are complicit in crimes and the chain of command leads to Modi and his counterpart home minister in Maharashtra. They took the lead in framing innocent educated Muslims in terror incidents which the Hindutva groups had committed.
Reports indicate that Vishwa Hindu Parishad secretary Praveen Togadia had funded Abhinav Bharat and Modi had donated funds to Swami Asimanand. Both Togadia and Modi are from Gujarat and Asimanand and Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur were based in Gujarat. Moreover Sunil Joshi, Ramchandra Kalsangrah and Sandeep Deange had visited Shabri Dham Ashram of Asimanand. They also had attended meeting at the house of Bharatbhai Riteshwar in Valsad. These details prove that the terrorist movement had not carefully and cautiously prepared to cause limited damage. It was well planned execution of mass murders over a long period of time through means of terrorism. Banning AB as well as VHP would have gone a long way to prevent India from being engulfing in the swamp of terrorism as some countries are today. It was also imperative to have investigated Modi’s role by an independent commission of jurists of unblemished reputation. Even the vice chair person of the US Commission on Religious Freedom Katrina Lantros Swett was astonished that the inquiry commissions in India and the Special Investigation Team did not take the sworn affidavit of Sanjive Bhatt in charge of intelligence department and security of Mod and the chief of SIB RB Sreekumar seriously. Both had accused Modi of involvement in the genocide of Muslims.
Furthermore Ramji and Sandeep Dange are still at large. Therefore the possibility of further attacks by AB modules of terrorists cannot be ruled out. Modi’s punitive action against Satish Verma needs more attention than either the state or central government has done. Verma while inquiring the fake encounter of Ishrat and others had also spoken about the government’s involvement in Parliament attack of December 13, 2001 and the 26/11 in Mumbai. Without fully gauging the dangers latent in the ideology of Abhinav Bharat and the depth of involvement of Modi in the pogroms it would not be possible to resolve the complex role of terrorists in cases of terrorism committed by extremists of Hindu community for which innocent Muslims had to suffer long term prison terms and then discharged without compensation and in other cases being killed on false pretext of terrorism. The Home Minister of India is afraid to ban Abhinav Bharat and maintain his accusation that RSS was training extremists among Hindus in terrorism like the Bajrang Dal activists.
The activists of Abhinav Bharat and Modi and his ilks in the right wing have one thing in common. To use RB Sreekumar’s description of Modi their “intrinsic mind is not for goodwill to all”. This description of Modi applies to Himani Savarkar, Purohit and a host of others in the Abhinav Bharat and other extremist groups. Sreekumar describes Modi’s complicity in the crimes against humanity in his open letter of October 5, 2011: “You have rewarded practically, all those govt. officers, who actively participated through their acts of commission and omission , in violation of their oath of allegiance to the Constitution of India, in the planning and execution of anti-minority genocide in 2002, after the most condemnable Godhra train burning incident.” If Modi has insidiously blamed LeT for the fire incident and allowed the pogroms and AB have blasted bombs in reaction to Jehadi terrorism then the victims of the pogroms and bomb explosions have been innocent Muslims, children, women and men who had nothing to do either with Pakistan or terrorism. What AB and Modi have in common is in the words of Sreekumar: “the ideas of exclusivism, sectarianism and hatred of certain sections Indian citizens, indoctrinated by the Sangh Parivar.”(4)
A better way to fight terrorism will be to fight these ideas sincerely with full might.
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(1)
http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/n-jayaram/narendra-modi-british-invitation-and-universal-jurisdiction
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Home-ministry-turns-down-Maharashtras-plea-to-ban-Abhinav-Bharat/articleshow/21978779.cms?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOIIndiaNews
(2)Charge sheet of September 29th 2008 blasts in Malegaon Exhibit No 23.
(3) Universal jurisdiction Wikipedia
(4) http://www.countercurrents.org/sreekumar170911.htm
August 25, 2013
Chapter 6
Mohammad Qateel Siddiquy (26)
Mohammad Qateel Siddiquy was in prison for seven months and refused to own up a crime he had not committed. On the day of the German Bakery attack 13 February 2012 there was another attempt to blow up the famed Dagdu Seth Halwai temple in Pune. This claim of police needs scrutiny as similar claim in Malegaon on 13 September 2006 turned out to be fake and the police reportedly drove away the planter of the would be bomb as a weak minded and framed innocent Muslims from the nine accused, instead. Qateel was accused by the police to be involved in the attempt. There is no proof that he was there. But the police say he wanted to plant the bomb there but a flower seller did not let him do so. Did the florist recognize him in an identity parade? Eleven others were also accused along with him. The failed attempt of the police and especially ATS chief Rakesh Maria to implicate him in Dagdu Seth Halwai temple is reminiscent of the failed attempt of the same agency in the case of Khwaja Yunus in the Ghatkoper bus attack of December 2, 2002. In the case of Yunus ATS officer Sachin Vaze and others had hit his breast with their feet and knees so hard that another accused Dr Mateen Ansari realized that he would not survive. Yunus vomited blood and could not survive. Dr Mateen gave this fact in writing. Till then the false news that Vaze had given had been the sensational news that the police jeep carrying Yunus had over turned and the accused made use of this to escape law. Till today when even Yaseen Bhatkal is safely in the hands of the Indian police there is no trace of the dead body of Yunus. Another accused acquitted in many charges of terror was killed in Tihar jail when a couple of other false charges were still pending. He was Shakeel Ahmad of Delhi. He was in jail for fourteen years during that period his toddler daughters grew up and now live in sorrow. Till this day the Indian police have not come clean on Shakeel or Qateel either. Both had told their wives of how the police had snuffed out any hope of their survival! They had stubbornly refused to sign the fake confession. Another accused Muzammil Akhtar of Malegaon is still alive because he signed the bogus confession when the ATS brought him in the presence of his father and threatened that even his mother and sister too would be unrobed and insulted like his father. The moot question is that Muzammil has spent not just seven months like Qateel, he has spent ten years and he is still not out even on bail: Why? He was accused of the Mulund local train attack that killed 14 on 13th March 2003 in Mumbai. It is really strange that all other accused have been let off! Discharged! Even Dr Mateen was given bail and discharged subsequently in the same case. Why has the wheel of justice stuck in the morass of miscarriage of justice for so long?
There are even more serious and disturbing questions which reflect on the nature of how the judiciary and jail system work in India against the Muslims. Qateel was already doomed by the police or else why should he have been put in the top security Yerwada jail instead regular jails. He had not been proved to be such a dreadful criminal as the dacoit Alok Bhalerao or a proved killer of two and extortionist as Sharad Mohol (who killed him) to require a top security jail. Qateel was to appear later on that Friday 8th June 2012 in the Pune court. The ATS had not found any culpable evidence against him in the Pune case and would have let the Delhi police take his custody. It is likely that he knew who had blown bombs in Pune German Bakery and it was a fatal cover up by the police. He was bumped off in the same way as Shahid Azmi was. Who would fear the truth revealed to the Delhi police?
If Qateel had taunted the dacoits and extortionists Alok Bhalerao and Sharad Mohol it would mean that he knew the real terrorists and would go on to tell it to the Delhi police. Given the location of five lock ups of three cells each in such high security set up it was impossible to kill him there. So the only way would be when the prisoners are brought into the open at 9.45 to 11.45 in the morning. It is but natural that at such a time there should have been even more tight security. And yet one of the two dacoits held Qateel’s legs and the other strangulated him. Even then the guards or the police did not come to know of the murder. It was only when one of the killers having told another prisoner who in turn told the guards of it that the news reached the ears of the authorities. Even if the close circuit camera were there the police would have conveniently lied as in so many other cases that the camera system was not working. So what we have here is extra judicial killing.
The police claim that Yaseen Bhatkal had given one lakh rupees for the treatment of Qateel’s daughter who later died. Now that the police in Delhi are interrogating Yaseen they should find out if he had really given one lakh to Qateel in addition to the one lakh he had sent to his wife on the occasion of Id that was celebrated on 9th August. When the police have 40 charges against Yaseen even before his arrest why they don’t have anything from him on his connection with Qateel and a host of other Muslim youths accused of being his associates!
How improbable it is that the police claim that Qateel had tried to plant the bomb at the temple but a florist refused to let him and so he took it all the way to the sea in Mumbai to dispose it off there! If Qateel was not involved in the Pune German Bakery case how could he have known where Yasin Bhatkal was hiding in Bihar. And after Yasin Bhatkal was arrested from the border region in Bihar on Wednesday 28th August 2013 why would the Bihar government refuse to register the crime and take custody of Yasin Bhatkal on 29th August?(1)
In this melee what hope is there for truth to see the light of the day? The only way for the truth to come out would be impartial inquiry by international bodies of repute. This is a way out as even David Richard Headley and Swami Asimanand have been either prevaricating or retracting whatever they have said. The Ministry of Home Affairs has also been hiding crucial information and facts like in the case of Intelligence Bureau special director Rajendra Kumar’s involvement in Ishrat Jahan case as well as many other cases. It is not only the Bihar government which is casting aspersion on Yasin Bhatkal arrest by its refusal to do anything with him. Qateel taunted Sharad Mohol and Alok Bhalerao which led to his killing but there was no one who saw the murder. So the question is still open as to who killed him. If the duo killed him who was behind them? The duo and Qateel were playing together, chatting and hobnobbing with each other well. Then how and what could go so wrong to lead to murder?(2) It could not be the taunt then that led to the murder. It could only be the fear that if the Delhi police which had arrested him a year before could come to know stark truth which the ATS did not want to share with it.
It is also unexplained till today why did not the ATS hand over Qateel to Delhi police on 29th May 2013 when his police custody ended. He had been in the custody of the police in Pune Yerwada jail from 1st May. There was enough time to have interrogated him in four weeks. Why did not the two so called ‘extremist nationalists’ kill him on 29th May itself.
The ATS prepared 81 pages of charge sheet in September 2012 in which it says that Qateel had threatened “second attempt” to blow the same temple. How could the police verify this and the court to judge? If nobody was present there in the notorious anda cell prison how could the ATS accept this when they had not accepted Qateel’s own insistence that he was not involved in crimes. In what way two criminals and dacoits are more reliable in jail than an innocent person? If the alleged threat to make second attempt was a boast why in heavens it should be taken as de facto intention of crime? There was little chance of Qateel ever coming out to commit a crime others have ascribed to him? Would he with no record of previous crimes threaten such second attempt? He would have been a fool to even think second attempt after having gone through the hell that is Indian jail for seven long months.(3)
Inexplicable is also the fact that Delhi police had arrested him on 22nd November 2011 and had him for more than five months to know all they wanted. Why did they not finish their job? Why did they not ascertain from him before handing him to another agency of another state? Why is the Hindu party BJP silent over this whole affair? Is the onus only on the Muslims all the time to struggle to prove their youths’ innocence?
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(1)
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/terror-suspect-killed-by-fellow-inmates-in-pune-jail/article3504634.ece
(2)
warrant-taunt-led-mohd-qateel-siddiqui-death-in-jail/1/200010.html
(3)
http://zeenews.india.com/news/maharashtra/siddiqui-killed-for-bragging-about-pune-temple-attack-cops_7981
Chapter 7
Hindutva Skylab of Gujarat falls along with lab assistant Vanzara
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh warned the nation on Independence Day August15, 2013 that the greatest danger to the country was from communalism. The people of the country hardly noted this warning as they are so much used to matters like endemic corruption and the scourge of rape. Given this ambience they could hardly think that the PM did not give a quotidian speech. But in essence that was not.
The prime minister was aware of the genocide of Muslims in 2002, the fake encounters and the use of religion based politics that the BJP was playing in an alarming manner. In direct opposition to him was the politics that Amit Shah and Narendra Modi were playing in attempting to eclipse the genocidal crimes as well as their involvement in the fake encounters. Thus a parallel system was at work. That is, the Hindutva juggernaut with its hidden agenda that included targeting Muslims as terrorist and the rest who found that unpalatable. The former believed them to be patriotic to the tune of their roguery as the last resort of patriotism. DG Vanzara the highest profiled police officer in Gujarat called it deshbhakti, love and devotion to the country.
For many years people of India had heard of the Hindutva experiment being made in Gujarat laboratory. They were also aware of the same experiment being replicated by Ashok Singhal of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, at least the threat of it. Now it is early sign that that experiment is tottering. It was brought about by the transfer of the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case from Gujarat to Maharashtra in order to facilitate the Hindutva higher ups to let another stalwart of its garrison fight the battle for Hindu rashtra. Narendra Modi alone could not handle all the fronts.
In this the most crucial role was played by Ram Jethmalani who saw that Amit Shah was not only given bail but also allowed to canvas in elections that took place in Gujarat and continue to fight for the upcoming 2014 election under his supervision in the biggest state of India, UP. It is the state which has Babri mosque demolished and a Ram temple coming up although in much staggered steps.
The Hindutva horde not only executed the pogroms and defended the accused in the murder and arson and loot they also had ace lawyers and public prosecutors especially inducted into the genocide, the arrests, the trials and manipulation of the legal system. Even the additional advocate general of the state of Gujarat Tushar Mehta instead of defending the victims would pass relevant information of the victims to Hindutva ideologue of RSS S Gurumurthy to ferry out points to prepare defense of the accused in the genocide in the courts across the country. But Additional Director General of police DG Vanzara was the first line of defense:
“I most respectfully would like to submit and state that I, along with my officers, stood beside this government like a bulwark whenever it faced an existential crisis in the past. When I, along with my officers, have been facing a similar crisis in my/our life/lives, it was expected of this government to reciprocate and firmly stand beside me and my officers with a similar vigour and determination, which to my utter shock and surprise, could not happen”
The existential threats came from first the man who was the prime minister of the country. AB Vajpayee wanted Modi removed but he succumbed to the pressure of the Hindutva core groups of supporters of the genocide and its architect, Modi. He exhorted the chief minister to do his rajdharm. Modi said he had complied with it. But Vanzara followed another path shown by another religious divine, Guru Gobind Singh. When his own existence was in danger Vanzara took a leaf from scripture of another religion, Sikhism. “Hence the only way for me and my officers is to adopt the path of Dharma as defined by Shri Guru Govind Singh, the tenth Divine Lord of Sikhs, who ordained to his disciples, "when all the ways and doors for getting justice are exhausted and closed, it is just (Dharma) to draw the sword." Thus Gujarat showed two different meanings of Dharma used by two sons of the soil. Had the constitutional law of the land prevailed there would have been a secular law in which homicide is a crime punished with death. But both the sons played the same tune through different pipes as the Modern day Nero was fiddling thanks to the subversion of justice.
It is quite clear that the pogroms of Muslims and the fake encounters in which mostly Muslims were killed followed one pattern. The innocent Muslims were blamed for the fire accident and the well planned pogroms were begun. According to Vanzara it was “the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding, and monitoring our actions from very close quarters.” He cannot afford to apply this only to the fake encounters for which he was arrest. It applies more the murder and mayhem in Naroda Patia where nearly 800 Muslims were herded into a dry well, petrol from above was poured on them and they were burnt alive. They were in such large a number that the commissioner of police PC Pande ordered that the dead bodies should be scattered all over the city of Ahmadabad to lessen the enormity of the pogroms. Pravin Togadia was sitting in the hospital of VHP boss of the city Jaideep Patel a doctor by profession and monitoring the situation as Maya Kodnan minister of children and women health was inciting the crowds of Hinds to kill, rape and burn the Muslims. When the killings subsided for the day in late evening Modi went on a watch tour of the areas. He blessed the women of Chharra community for having produced brave men to have handled the job. According to the most notorious murderer Babu Bajrangi Modi had visited the sites to shore up the zeal of the marauders so that they would do the same job next day and the day after. He had stipulated three days for the pogroms. A neutral court in India would like to see the pogroms and fake encounters as two sides of the same coin which they are. Natural justice demands and the failing courts have stigmatized India for the sorry past.
There is such a dimension of the events in Gujarat under Modi that only a full-fledged commission of inquiry of international repute could unearth the abysmal depth of horror and how it was covered up not just by Modi administration but that of Vajpayee at the centre. What Amit Shah did at state level LK Advani with tacit acquiescence of the Prime Minister of India did in the central government, issuing clean chits to Modi. This includes Vanzara’s own hospitality to the Hindu marauders who were arrested but he treated them to the gorgeous food in government guest house meant for class one officers and then in the evening he let the killers go home without registering crimes of genocide against any of them! Modi himself phoned Babu Bajrangi to surrender to police after hiding him from law in the Mount Abu government guest house! He saw to it that the petition of the widow Zakia Jafri was not entertained and when the court accepted it his SIT issued another clean chit to him.(1)
It is sinister on the part of Vanzara to forget that the highest number of police officers in the pogrom affected parts of the state were those very officers like himself and his immediate boss PP Pandey who were fully involved in the pogroms of Muslims and the cover up of the accused killers and rapists. The same also were active in the fake encounters. It is his shrewd nature to defend those very officers for the crimes of fake encounter and slur over the much more grievous crimes of genocide. Modi’s crime was that he awarded all those officers in the genocide cases who toed the government line and punished those who opposed his state policy of teaching Muslims a lesson. So how could his trusted lieutenant Vanzara claim now: “The most notable part of the whole episode is that they are made to suffer in the jails, inspite of the fact that they had been and are loyal soldiers of this government who fought incessant war against, Pakistan inspired terrorism with complete honesty, integrity and sincerity without falling prey to any of the mundane temptations.”
It is worth quoting at length what RB Sreekumar says in his open letter to Modi published on 17th September 2011.
“4/ Those, who got rewards for their alleged deviant services to you, include officers, who were given extension in service, good postings and post retirements lucrative assignments. They are persons like, (1) Shri G.Subbarao, (2) Shri Ashok Narayanan, (3) Dr. P.K.Mishra, (4) Shri P.K.Laheri, (5) Shri Sudhir Mankad, (6) Smt. Manjula Subramaniaman, (7) Shri K.C.Kapoor - all IAS officers and (8) Shri A.K.Bhargava, (9) Shri P.C.Pande, (10) Shri G.C.Raiger, (11) Shri M.K.Tandon, (12) Shri Deepak Swaroop, (13) Shri K.Nityanandam, (14) Shri A.K.Sharma, (15) Shr Shivanad Jha, (16) Shri Sudhir Sinha, (17) Shri D.G.Vanzara, (18) Shri S.S.Khandwawala, (19) Shri J.Mahapatra, (20) Shri O.P.Mathur, (21) Shri A.A.Saiyed, (22) Shri P.P.Pandey, (23) Shri Ashish Bhatia - all IPS officers, etc. Their specific alleged culpable role was graphically narrated in my VIth Affidavit to the Justice Nanavati Commission.
“5/- As you know among the govt. officials, who were victims of unwarranted punishments by your govt., myself lead the list. Ever since I presented facts about riots "falsifying" the State Govt. version to the Central Election Commission on 9.8.2002, I was issued with memos on trivial matters like Control Room Head Constable sending a secret message by fax to field officers, without my knowledge, by ACS (Home) Sh.Ashok Narayanan. Further the Govt. started an inquiry against me for writing to CP Ahmedabad Sh.K.R.Kaushik, about the alleged planting of weapons (fire arms) by DIG Sh.D.G.Vanzara, the then i/c of Ahmedabad City Crime Branch on a few Muslims of Dariapur on 2002 Rathyatra day. You may please note that this was the only adverse report about alleged illegal acts of Vanzara, in Gujarat Police records before his arrest for alleged fake encounter in April, 2007. Instead of probing into my information about Sh.Vanzara, the Chief Secretary started an inquiry against me, for punishing me even though the then DGP Sh.K.Chakravarthi reported that my act of reporting against Sh.Vanzara was part of my normal duties and so could not me treated as misconduct. Sir, had you checked Sh.Vanzara and monitored his work, accepting my report, he would not have indulged in alleged extra judicial killings of innocent people. Now these cases have brought bad name for your administration and Gujarat Police. This was an instance of saving a thief (chor) and punishing the policeman (kotwal), who pointed a finger at the thief.”(2)
The penchant of Modi and Vanzara was the pet idea of blaming Pakistan even when there is no incident involving that country, even fighting election in Gujarat became a clash between Mian Musharaf and Modi. The hard fact is that Pakistan did not have time to wash its dirty linen in Gujarat politics. So how could the fake encounters be at the behest of Pakistan or inspired by ISI? The four cases Vanzara mentions in his letter of resigning from the post of additional director general of police in protest are that of Ishrat Jahan and three others, Sohrabuddin, his wife Kauser and friend Tulsiram Prajapati, Sadiq Jamal Mahtar. These were not just fake encounters but real terrorism. If Italian extremists kidnap former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and kill him and this is recognized as an act of terrorism, India must also learn that falsely accusing innocent people and killing them was also terrorism. There are also more skeletons likely to fall down from the wardrobe of Modi. A senior police officer Sanjiv Bhatt has expressed his apprehension that Modi may be behind the murder of Haren Pandya for which eleven innocent Muslims had to languish in prison for more than half a dozen years.
Therefore the experiment that Modi and Vanzara along with other government and police officers made in the Gujarat laboratory of Hindutva was of far more serious and dangerous nature than people are willing to accept. Vanzara’s letter of resignation on Tuesday 3rd September 2013 is early straw in the wind.
The experiment in the laboratory may have been interrupted by the letter but it would resume nevertheless.
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(1)Tehelka 3November 2007.
(2) Countercurrent 17 September 2011.
Chapter 8
Asif Basheer Khan Accused in 7/11 Mumbai blasts in local trains
The Anti Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra tortured Asif Basheer Khan in the most inhuman way: threat of raping mother and wife in his presence in the prison. On 8th August 2013 he told the MCOCA court in Mumbai that the police had already applied third degree torture and forced him to implicate himself in the blasts of 11 July 2006. He refused in the most trying situation in his life. But they continued torturing him and threatened to bring his mother and wife and rape them inside the Kala Ghoda office of ATS if he did not sign on the confession paper they put before him. Even then he refused. In this way he was implicated in Malegaon blasts of 8th September 2006 as well.(1)
The ATS foisted a very ingenuous method of sensationalizing his arrest. He was arrested from Mira Road in Thane because when he had been Jalgaon he was a member of SIMI. The police gave it in the paper that a cab driver had identified him as the suspect who boarded the train at Church gate and planted the bomb. He had alighted from the taxi at Church gate on 11th July 2006 and had to pay 180 rupees as fare for travelling from Bandra. The driver did not have change so in a hurry he gave away 500 rupee note. The police calculated that this would appear a very plausible cogent cause of arrest and accusation. How could he forget the face of his large hearted benefactor and his largess! Two months later the ATS was allegedly inquiring about the passenger who boarded the train at Church gate on the fateful day. The cops claim that they found the cabbie who later identified him.
On 13 August2013 Asif told the court that the identity parade was held on 7th November 2006 in Arthur road jail. The officer who conducted the parade said he was the code numbered 631officer sent by the government of Maharashtra. But years later Asif applied for information of 631 it turned out that that officer was from Kokan named Shashikant. Therefore the officer who really conducted the parade committed impersonation which is a crime. And so the testimony of those who gave witness in identifying him cannot be legally acceptable. The officer who committed impersonation gave one name in the papers on identity and had another name in the ATS; he was not Shashikant from Ratnagiri. (2)
What is more the same special executive officer had also conducted the identity parade of the other accused and hence it was illegal and also criminal in their cases too.
In this way Asif Basheer Khan struggled hard and patiently to prove that he was innocent. He was framed in bogus charges of terror by the ATS. ATS’ modus operandi is the same very vulgar violation of chastity of the family members through threats coercing the accused into submission as this was also used in the case of Muzammil Akhtar accused for 13 March 2003 local train attack where ATS succeeded in making the accused confess what he had not done actually.
The ramification of Asif’s attack requires a commission of inquiry by the parliament or an international body of jurists. His real cause of arrest was no illegal act except that nearly six years ago the government had banned SIMI and he had been a member of SIMI in Jalgaon years ago, before migrating to Mumbai and taking a job of civil engineer in the metropolis. The police accused him for storing RDX and supplying it to the accused in 7/11 bombing as well as in September 2006 blasts in Malegaon. This stored RDX was the remnant of the huge amount of arms and RDX seized in Malegaon, Aurangabad and Ankari in May 2006. It is now becoming clear that the Hindutva terrorists of the Sunil Joshi and Lt Col Prasad Purohit modules were behind the use of RDX and the blasts.
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(1)Inquilab 9-8-2013
(2)Inquilab 14-8-2013
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Ehtesham Kutubuddin Siddiquy, Accused No 4
Case: 7/11 Mumbai local train attack MCOCA Special Case No.21/2006 Case: Fake encounter Wadala August 22, 2006
Police obstructing justice and destroying evidence and thieving
There are two cases in which Ehtesham K Siddiquy is trapped. One is the serial bomb blasts in local trains in Mumbai on July 11, 2006 where he along with Asif Bashir Khan alias Junaid alias Abdulla and Mohammad Faisal Ataur Rehman Shaikh is accused of planting bombs. But on April 25, 2013 Bharti Airtel officer appeared in the court with phone records that showed that he was not at the site of the blasts. (1)The three were either at their work place or at home. Ehtesham was at Mira Road the whole day on 7/11. The other case is that he is a witness to a fake encounter that took place in Wadala, Mumbai, where the police killed one Mohammad Ali believed to be a Pakistani on August 22, 2006. Ehteshan had seen him in Kala Chowki office of ATS. (2)
On August 3, 2013 the jail authorities of Arthur Road took Ehtesham Siddiquy to Kurla court. In his absence the current Superintendent Gond Patil, former Superintendent Swati Sathe currently Additional Director General of Police Maharashtra and ATS officer entered the barracks. They searched Ehtesham’s belongings and spread his papers, then picked up a file, his daily journal and items of everyday use. As they were doing it a fellow accused in the same case Sajid Ansari and other inmates objected to them Patil said that he would return them soon. On his return from Kurla court Ehtesham filed a complaint in the MCOCA court, to the police station at NM Joshi Marg and to the chief secretary of Home department complaining disappearance of important documents including the charge sheet on the fake encounter. He was preparing his defense in the continuing trial in court of the case of the fake encounter of Mohammad Ali, a Pakistani. Ehtesham had seen the Pakistani Mohammad Ali in Kala Chowki headquarters of Anti Terrorism Squad of Maharashtra. Subsequently Mohammad Ali was killed in the fake encounter on August 22, 2006 in Wadala, Mumbai.
Ehtesham appealed to the MCOCA court to order inquiry in the case and requested the court to recover his documents including the charge sheet in the fake encounter on which he was preparing his argument. He requested the NM Joshi marg police station to register a case of theft and conspiracy against the jail authorities. Furthermore he appealed to the principal secretary of Home department to stop the jail authorities from entering his barrack in his absence and searching his belongings. In the court the government prosecutor Raja Thakre argued that Ehtesham should complain against the jail authorities and not against the prosecution.
In the fake encounter case he had prepared some points in defense argument for his sake when he would be presented in the court. He now complains that the jail authorities have hatched a conspiracy and taken away his papers to show to the prosecution how to prepare to counter his argument and thus weaken the defense case. He had meticulously prepared point by point how to defend his argument that he had seen the Pakistani Mohammad Ali whom the ATS were questioning before they killed him in the fake encounter on August 22, 2006.
Points to note
On September 8, 2006 four bombs exploded in Malegaon. At that precise time there was a man called Mohammad Ali Shaikh present in the Kurla ATS office. The news channel showed the scenes of explosions in Malegaon. Just at that moment an ATS officer killed in 26/11 along with Hemant Karkare, Vijay Salaskar and another police officer Maeykar PI greeted the news with great joy and remarked that the Bajrang Dal had taken revenge in Malegaon for the train blasts in Mumbai on 7/11.(3) This Mohammad Ali Shaikh is different from the Pakistani the ATS had killed on August 22, 2006. Mohammad Ali Shaikh was falsely accused in the Malegaon blasts of September 8, 2006 and also in 7/11. He has been given bail in Malegaon case but not in 7/11. He was questioned in the night of November 10, 2006 at his house in Shivajinager Govandi in Mumbai. Next day on November 11, the police arrested him and slapped terrorism charges on him of his involvement in Malegaon 2006 blasts. (4)
This rigmarole in framing innocent Muslims shows that the Mohammad Ali killed in Wadala fake encounter was from Pakistan but the police found an Indian Muslim with that name to bear the cross of guilt. When arrested Mohammad Ali sheikh was 37 years old salesman living with wife Saidunisa and children.
For the same case of 7/11 the ATS arrested 13 men but two years later the Crime Branch arrested five Indian Mujahideen and charged them.
Ehtesham had filed 1500 RTI applications of which 400 deal with 7/11. He says: "I asked for the minutest of details—date of arrest, place where we were kept, platforms on which the trains had halted. Initially, the replies were vague; today our defence case stands on the information gathered under the Act." This shows that he was innocent and had to struggle so hard for gathering proof for his acquittal. "Earlier, even when we screamed out loud that we were innocent, no one listened to us. Today, we are backing it with evidence." "I am putting these years in jail to good use. Life in prison can bring out the worst in a person. If the mind is not channeled into doing something constructive, the strongest of men can break down."
Police strategy
The police in India are wont to arrest innocent Muslims and falsely charge them in multiple cases of terrorism. This strategy makes it difficult for the victims to come out of prison for years on end and even after a decade.
Grave and cataclysmic indications
Ashish Khaitan has appealed through his letter to the high court in Maharashtra about what he pertinently claims: “My research has shown that at least in three cases prosecuted by ATS Maharashtra, namely the July 11 2006 Mumbai local train blasts, the 2006 Malegaon Blasts and the Pune German Bakery case of February 2010, the ATS has deliberately created bogus evidence, extracted false confessions by the most inhuman torture, planted explosives in the houses of the accused and thus implicated innocent Muslim youth.”(5) What he has not taken into notice is even more disturbing namely that the director general of police of Maharashtra Dr Pasricha had claimed that behind the serial bomb blasts of July 11, 2006 there was a Maharashtrian leader and behind the September 8, 2006 blasts in Malegaon were the activists of Bajrang Dal. No one heeded this remark he made in public on September 9, 2006. A Marathi newspaper called Punnynagri dated September 11, 2006 referred this only to castigate and scorn Dr PS Pasricha as bejabaddar police pramaukh “irresponsible police chief.” This writer has a copy of it and he has guessed that leader to be either Bal Thackeray or Sharad Pawar. His ground of suspicion is that the two were cronies and were the only leaders who called shots in the state in the nineties of the last century and the first decade of the 21st century. For example it was Thackeray who exhorted Hindus on January 6 1993 to retaliate to Muslims in Mumbai [Bombay, then] which led to manslaughter of the minority community people in the city and in the first decade of 21st century he time and again expressed need for suicide bomber squads of Hindus to take on the Muslims. Pawar was the defence minister at that time and through his intervention Madhukar Saroptdar was not arrested although he was caught with arms he was supplying to the Shiv Sainiks to kill Muslims. What is even more remarkable is that the then Chief Minister Sudhakar Naik had blamed Pawar for the blood bath in Mumbai and it was again Pawar who managed to invite Saroptdar to meet the Prime Minister Narsimha Rao who toured the city at that time. So the question arises as to who is ultimately responsible for the arrest of Ehtesham and others? Only the police???
The editorial in the Marathi newspaper also describes that there was a move in the Maharashtra legislative assembly on breach of privileges against Dr Pasricha. If the Maharashtra government were serious in fighting terrorism they should have asked the police chief to furnish proof of the Maharashtrian leader behind the train blasts and Bajrang Dal’s involvement in Malegaon 2006 blasts. The government included Congress and Nationalist Congress Party of Sharad Pawar members. For both the attacks Ehtesham and other Muslims had to languish in prison and are still doing it with justice clearly denied to them.
It is in this context it is relevant to quote Khaitan, “I am aware that normally, investigation of crime is the task of the police and verdicts of guilt or innocence, the realm of courts. What makes me intervene in this process is the fact that the same has become the reverse of what it is intended to be. When the police deliberately obstructs justice and misleads courts of law, it cannot be left unchecked.” The gravamen of the situation is that “None of these agencies [ATS, Crime Branch of Mumbai and others] placed the entire relevant material before the MCOCA court trying an entirely unconnected set of 13 men for 7/11 Blasts. Why?”
Was the Maharashtrian leader really involved so powerful to derail investigation? Who is he?
Eshtesham was arrested a month after 7/11 blasts. His arrest in August 2006 indicates that he belongs to the 13 accused in the blasts. They were accused by ATS under KP Raghuvanshi. But then Hemant Karkare replaced Raghuvanshi and remarked on August 16, 2008 that he had not come across SIMI involvement in any case. (6) It proves that the thirteen arrested for 7/11 were innocent Muslims framed on deliberate false charges. Ehtesham was arrested in August 2006 and was one of the 13.
There serious and worrisome implications of this. One that according to Malegaon 2006 blasts accused Abrar Ahmed Raghuvanshi had tried to bribe him into owning his involvement in return he would get fabulous amount of money, land and flats and assurance that he would be bailed out. Suboth Kumar Jaiswal was Raghuvanshi’s assistant and Sachin Kadam of ATS and Malegaon ASP Rajwardhan visited Abrari on September 1, 2008 and told him that they would remove the new investigators [Karkare and his assistants]who were changing the investigation that Raghuvanshi had done and then they would take Abrar out of jail after two and half months. Thus Karkare was assassinated according to this deep conspiracy and Raghuvanshi succeeded Karkare who died on November 26, 2008. It was therefore Raghuvanshi who turned the investigation to the 13 accused who were already in jail for two years. But the new set of 5 Indian Mujahideen with Sadiqu Shaikh were arrested in 2008 by the Crime Branch and supposed to be real bombers of 7/11. The farce that the ATS and MCOCA court is conducting is trying the 13 (including Ehtesham) who were not really involved.
Consequences: Raghuvanshi could not win over Abrar accused in September 8 2006 blasts who turned hostile and renounced his being an approver but Raghuvanshi got Sadiqu discharged from the earlier case of July 11, 2006 serial blasts in the trains. This is an excellent game that Raghuvanshi and RR Patil the Home Minister played, the game that Khaitan calls “pick and choose” terrorists. These worthies are like the police officer inspector Thomas in Arundhati Roy’s novel God of Small Things who tapped the breasts of a woman while accusing her of adultery with his baton as if he was picking and choosing mangoes from a cart in market!
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(1) http://www.indianexpress.com/news/we-weren-t-on-the-trains.../1111537/0
(2) Inquilab Friday August 16, 2013.
3) Inquilab Sunday magazine August 17, 2008.
(4)Sunday Express, Mumbai edition November 6, 2011.
(5) http://gulail.com/ashish-khetan-petitions-before-the-bombay-high-court/
(6) Urdu Times August 16, 2008.
Chapter two
Case: 7/11 Mumbai local train attack
Fahim Arshad Ansari
Acquittal with a trail of serious deliberation
Fahim Arshad Ansari was arrested on February 12, 2008 for the attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur, UP. He along with Sabbaudin was also charged with providing important details of location in Mumbai of strategic buildings and sites for possible terrorist attacks by Lashka-r-Toiba. Such locations included offices of Mumbai Police Commissioner, Director General of Police, Gateway of India, Colaba, Tajmahal hotel, Churchgate railway station, Reliance energy and AKSA beach. (1)Judge ML Tahilani of Mumbai high court dismissed the charges because Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan were directed to remain in VT now known as CST. (2) Ismail Khan was killed and Kasab was shot at and injured and was hanged in 2013. The judge also laughed away the prosecution presenting a hand drawn map of the sites in the handwriting of Fahim when better and accurate maps by Google Earth with GPS and VoIP were used by the handlers of the terrorist attackers. This is a serious flaw in the investigation because it proves the involvement of the police in Mumbai in framing innocent educated Muslim youths in terror charges. Fahim lived in Goregaon and his own city’s police framing him is a betrayal. The judge had closely ascertained from Kasab and found that Kasab and Ismail Khan were not instructed to go to Chowpatty or the Gateway of India and some other places. It shows up the Mumbai police added names of location according to the whim and calculation in framing the Muslim youths. The leading public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam acted like cock of the walk in presenting the case and collecting huge amount of money as his fees.
The Maharashtra government had appealed against the high court verdict but the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal in August 2012. A year later Fahim is still languishing in the Bareilly court for his alleged involvement in the Rampur attack. To fight the case his wife Yasmin had to sell her flat in Bandra.
The facts of arrest
Fahim was actually arrested on February 1st, 2008 from Lucknow and for an hour was kept in Lok chowky police station in that city. The Special Task Force shifted him from there to an unknown place and kept him in a bungalow for fifteen days. (3)
Torture and forced false confession
His hands were handcuffed in chain and tied to a place. The police prevented him from sleep except for two to three hours and tortured him. They forced him to make maps of Mumbai with locations marked. They also tortured him into signing blank papers. They even threatened to kill him in fake encounter. Once they took him to a farm at night with his head covered in black cloth. They pointed their guns at him and ordered him to run. The premonition of imminent death in encounter scared him so much that he burst out weeping and crying. Then they told him that if he did what they wanted they would not kill him. Thereafter he did three things they subsequently told him to do: one, they prepared fictitious stories of involvement in terror and asked him to sign, two, draw maps of Mumbai and , three, blank papers he was told to sign. He did what they told. This went on for ten days.
Then the police took him to Rampur in the morning of February 10th and kept him in an unknown place. At 5 in the evening they presented him in court where the lady judge did not ask him anything and sent him to remand. At 7 that evening he was put in jail where four others were also present he did not know them. They took away all his belongings including clothes, watch, mobile, etc. On February 11th the ATS of UP visited the Rampur prison and took him away for remand. The police tortured him excruciatingly and on February 16 they transferred him to a police station in Dadar (East), Mumbai. The Maharashtra ATS questioned him and took him to his house in Mumbai and allowed him just a minute to see his daughter and then took him away. On the same day they presented him before ATS chief Hemant Karkare and another officer Pram Vir Singh in the Nagpada police station.
On February 16th ATS chief Hemant Karkare thoroughly questioned him for several hours. He scrutinized his past record and also cross checked him from all angles and remarked that Fahim was not involved in any crime in Mumbai or Maharashtra and hence he should be sent back to Rampur. He was locked up in Rampur jail on February 18th. 2008. In the meantime Karkare was assassinated on November 26, 2008 during the Mumbai attacks. A year after Fahim was presented before Karkare the ATS now under KP Raghuvanshi framed him in Mumbai 2008 attacks case. For a whole year he was in Rampur jail! And yet Raghuvanshi did that!
In April 2008 he was presented in Rampur court. He told the judge that he was tortured and abused and his mother and sister were also abused in the filthiest language by the police and how the STF coerced him into signing confession and almost killed him in a fake encounter for that. But the judge did not take any notice of this.
Important facts for notice
Even after Karkare had cleared him of the charge of any involvement in terrorism, Raghuvanshi deliberately implicated him in 26/11 case. This he did despite the fact that David Coleman Headley had confessed that it was he who surveyed Mumbai strategic sites for attack and the FBI even questioned Fahim and Sabauddin for several hours. Even so the Maharashtra government not only reinstated RR Patil as home minister after the 26/11 attacks but reappointed Raghuvanshi as ATS chief and continued to promote him. Raghuvanshi is now the police commissioner of Thane.
But there are some facts which Fahim has said that provide ‘critical mass’ indicating a much deeper conspiracy and involvement of several governments and even the judiciary which fail to give justice to Muslims and where do we go from here. That leaves no option but the necessity for International Criminal Court or the UNO to help India surmount the morass of disaffection of the minority and bias of its police and the misguidance of the majority community as far as who the real terrorists are. One, the FBI of America did not find the involvement of Fahim in 26/11 attacks and hence he was not named in their charge sheet. Therefore the onus is and should be on the governments of Maharashtra and the central government to question Raghuvanshi why did he require Fahim who was again brought back to Mumbai by the Crime Branch on December 17, 2009? Second, there was no business of Fahim drawing maps because the matter of the map was not included in trial until February 5th, 2009. Till then he had been given remand four times and appeared in court several times and yet there was no mention of the map. Why ? Who planted the map in Ismail Khan’s pocket? There was no dirt mark of mud, blood and sweat on it. Nor was the map even folded! This is unbelievable because Ismail Khan was killed in a battle that lasted for so many hours since the attacks started! Third, why did Justice ML Tahaliani not question Kasab in the presence of Fahim when the Pakistani terrorist had at long last confessed his crimes on July 20, 2009? Anyway FBI had questioned him thoroughly. The Judge had asked Kasab in camera about Fahim. Kasab drew a blank, he did not know him. The Judge was surprised but why did he not take it on record?
There are even more disturbing features. If the Rampur police excessively tortured him into drawing maps of Mumbai in February 2008 was it not a sinister case of conspiracy? There seem to be two groups who struck Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Kasab and his handlers already had Google Earth maps and locations marked. This group did not know the other group to which the police wanted maps from Fahim. This latter group probably spoke Marathi and assassinated Karkare. The police commissioner Hasan Gafoor had called Karkare to his control room while Rakesh Maria told him to report to his. If Malegaon blasts of 2006 accused Abrar is telling truth in his affidavit then Suboth Kumar Jaiswal and other officers of police with him were behind removing Karkare from their path because Karkare was changing the findings of the group of his predecessor Raghuvanshi. This is beyond the competence of the court to find and hence it is likely that it would remain an unsolved mystery surrounding the conspiracy.
But there is another that also defies solution. Fahim’s wife Yasmin had told him in prison that his lawyer Shahid Azmi was under threat. The ATS had threatened to kill him if he continued his defense of Fahim. He even stopped going court out of fear. Was Shahid assassinated for having defended Fahim and would have defended other accused in false terrorism cases? So also will remain it a mystery that David Headley had reconnoitered the sites of attack and yet the police went after Fahim precisely for that reason. It reminds one of the other mysteries that Headley had not found Ishrat Jahan as a terrorist but the Gujarat police went ahead and even killed her, etc.
Fahim in his letter from jail written in March 2010 says that he was not acquitted because the media, the judge and the government had trapped him in the false case. The first investigation officer Ashok T Duraphe came for a short time to meet him. Fahim wept and told him that he had nothing to do with 26/11. Duraphe told him hamen pata hai ki tera(Fahim Ansari) ka is hamley sey koi taaluk nahin hay. Par ham tujhe aisey hi nahin chod saktey. Tera naam akhbar and tv men itna aagya hai ki abb kutch nahin ho sakta. Iss case men tu phans gya hai. “We know that you (Fahim Ansari) have no connection with this attack. But we cannot leave you, nevertheless. Your name has been so much in the newspapers and on TV that we are helpless. You have been trapped.”
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(1)
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/fbi-wants-to-quiz-fahim-ansari-for-2611-terror-strikes/417766/0
(2)
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/1378515/report-fahim-sabauddin-s-release-punctures-mumbai-police-claims#
(3) This version of his arrest and other quotes of Fahim are from his letter from prison published in Urdu Times dated March 8, 2010. See the facsimile of the letter attached.
Chapter 4
The classic case of deliberate arrest of two brothers for mistaken identity
Mohammad Zahid Abdul Majid and Javed Abdul Majid
One of the most bizarre cases of deliberate framing of two brothers in terrorism charges has permanently soured relationship of father with the disobedient one. The apple of his eyes is in jail for the last seven years but the expelled and forsaken is out on bail after having spent five years in prison.
On the day Indian government of PM AB Vajpayee banned Students Islamic Movement of India the police inspector in charge of City Police Station in Malegaon Hansraj detained Javed Abdul Majid on the false charge of giving a speech in Bhiku chowk against the ban to instigate the public against the government. Earlier in the year five youths of Malegaon were pasting posters for the recovery of the demolished Babri mosque. The police had chased them away. But one of them Mudassir was caught. He along with Zahid and the other three were members of SIMI. Mudassir knew Zahid by the name of Javed and gave this name to the police. The name of Zahid was recorded in police diary as Javed. On the day Zahid was pasting posters his younger brother Javed reprimanded him. Javed scolded his elder brother Zahid for playing with fire on the issue of Babri mosque for it would hardly change the situation. It would not serve any purpose, either.
The participation of Zahid in SIMI activities brought the police to the door of their house in Islampura. As Majid also had admonished his son Zahid not to get involved in SIMI he became furious and lost his balance and drove his elder son Zahid out of the house and forbade him from entering the lane in which the house was located. Even when Zahid was released on bail in the bomb blasts case of September 8, 2006 his father did not relent. Zahid had to go back to Phoolsanghvi, Yawatmal, where he used to perform namaz as an imam.
Javed had not given any speech though his elder brother Zahid was involved in SIMI activities. His father Majid was a responsible man in his personal and civil life. As a teacher in a village he had worked with Marathi teachers in a mixed school where majority of the students were Hindus. He had celebrated the Independence Day and the Republic Day in a rare spirit of national unity. He would organize rangolee decoration of the school ground. The non Muslim teachers were impressed by his civility and togetherness. He would also organize tours and would enjoy the outing with his family participating in the educational excursions. That abruptly ended his carefree contentment in family life and satisfaction in his métier for good when the police woke him at 2 am on May 12, 2006.
Majid’s niece had got married on May 11, 2006. He was busy in arranging the wedding dinner till late in the night and returned home very tired. The police surprised him and disturbed the family greatly when they knocked at 2 am in the wee hours of May 12th. They ordered him to bring his son Javed, the SIMI activist. Zahid and not Javed was the SIMI activist he argued with the arresting officer. He had already expelled from house his son Zahid for being a member of SIMI and where was he (Zahid) the father did not know and had never cared to know because Zahid had disobeyed him. So the poor father had to surrender Javed the younger son for the misdeed of the elder. Neither the father nor the son knew why the police had arrested Javed. It was in the court that Javed came to know that the police had slapped the charge of the arms haul case familiarly known as the Aurangabad arms haul case against him. Majid was aghast with the shock! (Listen to the interview of Majid given to the MilliGazette on August 21, 2013.)
Zahid
Javed
Majid
Rokayya, mother of Javed and Zahid
Chapter 5
Abhinav Bharat, not banning it: a step into the dark abyss
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ letter of July 2013 made public on August 22, 2013 has come as a shock. The MHA refused to ban the Hindutva extremist terror outfit Abhinave Bharat as the Government of Maharashtra had appealed it to do. According to the first published report it considers AB as only “a ginger movement.” It would imply that its involvement in Malegaon 2008 blast was carefully calculated and the blast was carried out to cause limited harm. Six people lost their life and more than a hundred were injured at the Bhiku chowk, Malegaon, on Septermber 29, 2008.
This flies in the face of reason. Soon after the bomb blew up Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur rang up Ramji Kalsangra.
Sadhvi: How many have died in the explosion?
Ramji: Two or three have died.
Sadhvi : You had calculated many would die when you went there.
Ramji: There was some mistake in the timing. We tried to park the motor bike at two or three places but we were not allowed there. Then we parked at one place and I left the spot. There was not a huge crowd then. There was so much explosive material that the front part of the vehicle was blown to smithereens.
Of course they did calculate to cause maximum deaths because their chosen spot was the so called Nukad corner but such was the crowd that there was no possibility of carrying it that far. The local people at the Bhiku chowk said that the Ramji had tried to go into the crowd of women but the lady police did not allow him. Twice the lady officer turned him back. The barricade was manned by the lady police. In fact it was also difficulty for any man to enter the thick crowd of women and to carry a vehicle was unthinkable. Then the owner of the transport company asked his servant to remove the bike. But the handle was locked so he sent his servant to the police chowki across the road but the cops dilly dallied. One of them came to the vehicle but refused to remove the vehicle because the handle was locked. The people who gathered around then used their muscles and disturbed the focus of the box containing the bomb. The worshippers would come out of the big mosque after prayer for tea and snack every night at 9.30. But that was the special night for appealing to god for special prayer. The crowd was held back because of the special lengthy prayer for half an hour. So the casualty figure was less on account of the accidental delay which the terrorists failed to take into consideration. How did then the ministry think it was calculated to cause limited harm?
Second nefarious argument of the ministry was that AB movement was a reaction to Jihad terrorism. This cannot be a justification or extenuating of the serious charge against it or the possibility of future resurgence of the movement. What the central government ministry is doing now is what Chief Minister Narendra Modi did on February 27, 2002 night. His Newtonian third law ushered in the pogroms of Muslim from which he has not retracted till this day. In 2007 interview with Karan Thapar he gnashed his teeth boiling with rage at the media czar and in subdued voice he remarked that only one or two persons hold the view that he was a mass murderer and abruptly truncated the interview. He did not accept even the traditional skull cap during the sadhbhauvna farce. To a foreign channel in July 2013 he uttered kutte ke bache the litters of dogs and bitches to describe Muslims. Therefore there is cause of concern to look at AB and Modi government sponsored terrorism against Muslims as of the same nature. Modi government had had a wont to frame Muslims in false charges of terrorism, not once but for umpteen times.. Abhinav Bharat and the phenomenon of Modi RSS pracharak as ruler of Gujarat are manifestations of the same extremism of the right wing fundamentalism and hatred against Muslims.
A fuller perception of what had happened in Malegaon earlier attack of 2006 and other places clearly indicates the involvement of the extremist Hindutva organization AB. The hallmark of the AB is that whenever they struck, the innocent Muslims were accused in the media, the media trial and publicity of them went on for weeks together and they in the eyes of the public were made to bear the cross of ignominy and later framed in bogus terror charges by the police as in the case of Fahim Ansari in 26/11 and the nine accused in Malegaon 2006 blasts. Other cases piled up like the German Bakery case where without proof of actual involvement of Mirza Himayat Baig, he was sentenced to death nevertheless. The stage was set much earlier when the National Democratic Alliance government in control of the Hindu party BJP through its ordinance banned Students Islamic Movement of India on February 18, 2001 as it tried to piggy ride the US war on terrorism. There was no involvement of any Muslim from India in the 9/11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon but within a week in an unseemly hurry the government of Atal B Vajpayee banned SIMI. This is in sharp contrast with the governmental refusal to ban AB even after its manifest Constitution became public, its commitment, its seditious attempt to overthrow the government and its association with the Israeli and Nepalese governments in real acts of terror.
The MHA must not be surprised to know that their getting Zabiuddin Ansari and Abdul Karim Tunda extradited from the Gulf countries by way of Nepal also applies to the terrorists like Lt Col Prasad Purohit whose crimes cannot remain just a “ginger movement”. (1)Purohit and other accused in Malegaon 2008 blast had sought steady supply of weapons, diplomatic recognition from Israel, safe haven in Tel Aviv etc., and training in arms from Nepalese army as per AB’s understanding with the members of royal family of Nepal.(2) As Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and tried him in Israel in 1961on grounds that “universal jurisdiction” based on “universal nature of the crimes in question” and "grave offenses against the law of nations itself “entitles it to try and punish the Nazi leader who had committed the crimes even when Israel had not come into existence and even the Genocide Convention had not come into effect. Israel came in existence in 1948 and the Genocide Convention in 1951. This precedence is applicable not only to Purohit but also Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Their acts during their tenure in military service and in office as Chief Minister respectively cannot be called “ginger movement”. In the case of Modi no other than the Supreme Court had dubbed him as a modern day Nero in 2004. He had toured affected areas in the evening of February 28th 2002. Babu Bajrangi and the Charra community told the Tehelka reporter that Modi had exhorted them to continue their killing the next day (Tehelka November 2007). In the case of Charles Taylor the Supreme Court of Sierra Leon ruled that "the sovereign equality of states does not prevent a Head of State from being prosecuted before an international criminal tribunal or court." If India can arrest members of Menon family like Yakub Menon from Nepal to stand trial for terrorism in India it also applies to the terrorists within India according to hostes humani generis ('enemies of the human race') principle of international jurisprudence. Even Henry Kissinger accepted that heads of states and public officials are on par with the pirates and other outlaws before the global bar of justice for breaking laws against humanity. (3)
Indian courts may not regard the crimes of Modi or Purobit as grave violations of either the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide or crimes against humanity or crimes against nations. Therefore the need for foreign intervention based on international bar of justice. If Eichmann was an ideologue of Nazism then the RSS paracharak or propagandist Narendra Modi carried out the Hindutva experiment of purging Muslims according to the philosophy that RSS ideologue Guru Golwalkar espoused in emulation of Nazism. The collector of Godhra had declared that the fire in S6 compartment of Sabarmati Express train was an accident Modi in the night of February 27, 2002 changed it into an attack by ISI and Lashka-re-Toiba. Even he gave a call for strike the next day and allowed his police to let Hindus take revenge upon the Muslims for three days. It was like Adolf Hitler getting the German parliament burnt down and blaming it on the communists and the Jews as enemies of Germany behind it. The police blamed the Ganchi Muslims of Godhra for the train incident and even accused Maulana Umarji as the mastermind. He was acquitted by the court and the innocent people were convicted on what clearly appears to be false charges of terrorism. Since then Modi has also been involved in fake encounters which also constitute grave crimes against humanity. If the Israeli kidnapped Eichmann from South America the Gujarat police by the approval of Modi kidnapped Sohrabuddin, his wife and friend Tulsiram Prajapati, Ishrat Jahan and three others from Mahrasthra and Kashmir and killed them. The Gujarat kidnapping was from different states of the Union of India like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, UP, etc. Indian courts have failed in catching on the idea of the “extraordinary renditions” Purohit also had a North Eastern rebel leader brought to Delhi. He killed him and let the dead body slide into the gutter. What is even more disturbing for democracy, Purohit had been complicit with the ruling monarchy in Nepal in their fight against the Maoist insurgency. He wanted to kill RSS leader Indresh Kumar who supported the democracy movement in the neighbouring country and for other ulterior reasons. These acts of terror of the most active and the mind behind the Abhinav Bharat cannot be called as “ginger movement.” Moreover he had trained activists of Bajrang Dal and RSS in arms and assembling of bombs and even supplied RDX and bombs. If the government in Delhi does not still want to ban the Abhinav Bharat it is their outlook. But international jurisdiction takes note of it all the same. It also takes note of the fact that the high officials like ADG of police PP Pandy in Gujarat and chief of Anti Terrorism Squad of Maharashtra KP Raghuvanshi are complicit in crimes and the chain of command leads to Modi and his counterpart home minister in Maharashtra. They took the lead in framing innocent educated Muslims in terror incidents which the Hindutva groups had committed.
Reports indicate that Vishwa Hindu Parishad secretary Praveen Togadia had funded Abhinav Bharat and Modi had donated funds to Swami Asimanand. Both Togadia and Modi are from Gujarat and Asimanand and Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur were based in Gujarat. Moreover Sunil Joshi, Ramchandra Kalsangrah and Sandeep Deange had visited Shabri Dham Ashram of Asimanand. They also had attended meeting at the house of Bharatbhai Riteshwar in Valsad. These details prove that the terrorist movement had not carefully and cautiously prepared to cause limited damage. It was well planned execution of mass murders over a long period of time through means of terrorism. Banning AB as well as VHP would have gone a long way to prevent India from being engulfing in the swamp of terrorism as some countries are today. It was also imperative to have investigated Modi’s role by an independent commission of jurists of unblemished reputation. Even the vice chair person of the US Commission on Religious Freedom Katrina Lantros Swett was astonished that the inquiry commissions in India and the Special Investigation Team did not take the sworn affidavit of Sanjive Bhatt in charge of intelligence department and security of Mod and the chief of SIB RB Sreekumar seriously. Both had accused Modi of involvement in the genocide of Muslims.
Furthermore Ramji and Sandeep Dange are still at large. Therefore the possibility of further attacks by AB modules of terrorists cannot be ruled out. Modi’s punitive action against Satish Verma needs more attention than either the state or central government has done. Verma while inquiring the fake encounter of Ishrat and others had also spoken about the government’s involvement in Parliament attack of December 13, 2001 and the 26/11 in Mumbai. Without fully gauging the dangers latent in the ideology of Abhinav Bharat and the depth of involvement of Modi in the pogroms it would not be possible to resolve the complex role of terrorists in cases of terrorism committed by extremists of Hindu community for which innocent Muslims had to suffer long term prison terms and then discharged without compensation and in other cases being killed on false pretext of terrorism. The Home Minister of India is afraid to ban Abhinav Bharat and maintain his accusation that RSS was training extremists among Hindus in terrorism like the Bajrang Dal activists.
The activists of Abhinav Bharat and Modi and his ilks in the right wing have one thing in common. To use RB Sreekumar’s description of Modi their “intrinsic mind is not for goodwill to all”. This description of Modi applies to Himani Savarkar, Purohit and a host of others in the Abhinav Bharat and other extremist groups. Sreekumar describes Modi’s complicity in the crimes against humanity in his open letter of October 5, 2011: “You have rewarded practically, all those govt. officers, who actively participated through their acts of commission and omission , in violation of their oath of allegiance to the Constitution of India, in the planning and execution of anti-minority genocide in 2002, after the most condemnable Godhra train burning incident.” If Modi has insidiously blamed LeT for the fire incident and allowed the pogroms and AB have blasted bombs in reaction to Jehadi terrorism then the victims of the pogroms and bomb explosions have been innocent Muslims, children, women and men who had nothing to do either with Pakistan or terrorism. What AB and Modi have in common is in the words of Sreekumar: “the ideas of exclusivism, sectarianism and hatred of certain sections Indian citizens, indoctrinated by the Sangh Parivar.”(4)
A better way to fight terrorism will be to fight these ideas sincerely with full might.
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(1)
http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/n-jayaram/narendra-modi-british-invitation-and-universal-jurisdiction
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Home-ministry-turns-down-Maharashtras-plea-to-ban-Abhinav-Bharat/articleshow/21978779.cms?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=TOIIndiaNews
(2)Charge sheet of September 29th 2008 blasts in Malegaon Exhibit No 23.
(3) Universal jurisdiction Wikipedia
(4) http://www.countercurrents.org/sreekumar170911.htm
August 25, 2013
Chapter 6
Mohammad Qateel Siddiquy (26)
Mohammad Qateel Siddiquy was in prison for seven months and refused to own up a crime he had not committed. On the day of the German Bakery attack 13 February 2012 there was another attempt to blow up the famed Dagdu Seth Halwai temple in Pune. This claim of police needs scrutiny as similar claim in Malegaon on 13 September 2006 turned out to be fake and the police reportedly drove away the planter of the would be bomb as a weak minded and framed innocent Muslims from the nine accused, instead. Qateel was accused by the police to be involved in the attempt. There is no proof that he was there. But the police say he wanted to plant the bomb there but a flower seller did not let him do so. Did the florist recognize him in an identity parade? Eleven others were also accused along with him. The failed attempt of the police and especially ATS chief Rakesh Maria to implicate him in Dagdu Seth Halwai temple is reminiscent of the failed attempt of the same agency in the case of Khwaja Yunus in the Ghatkoper bus attack of December 2, 2002. In the case of Yunus ATS officer Sachin Vaze and others had hit his breast with their feet and knees so hard that another accused Dr Mateen Ansari realized that he would not survive. Yunus vomited blood and could not survive. Dr Mateen gave this fact in writing. Till then the false news that Vaze had given had been the sensational news that the police jeep carrying Yunus had over turned and the accused made use of this to escape law. Till today when even Yaseen Bhatkal is safely in the hands of the Indian police there is no trace of the dead body of Yunus. Another accused acquitted in many charges of terror was killed in Tihar jail when a couple of other false charges were still pending. He was Shakeel Ahmad of Delhi. He was in jail for fourteen years during that period his toddler daughters grew up and now live in sorrow. Till this day the Indian police have not come clean on Shakeel or Qateel either. Both had told their wives of how the police had snuffed out any hope of their survival! They had stubbornly refused to sign the fake confession. Another accused Muzammil Akhtar of Malegaon is still alive because he signed the bogus confession when the ATS brought him in the presence of his father and threatened that even his mother and sister too would be unrobed and insulted like his father. The moot question is that Muzammil has spent not just seven months like Qateel, he has spent ten years and he is still not out even on bail: Why? He was accused of the Mulund local train attack that killed 14 on 13th March 2003 in Mumbai. It is really strange that all other accused have been let off! Discharged! Even Dr Mateen was given bail and discharged subsequently in the same case. Why has the wheel of justice stuck in the morass of miscarriage of justice for so long?
There are even more serious and disturbing questions which reflect on the nature of how the judiciary and jail system work in India against the Muslims. Qateel was already doomed by the police or else why should he have been put in the top security Yerwada jail instead regular jails. He had not been proved to be such a dreadful criminal as the dacoit Alok Bhalerao or a proved killer of two and extortionist as Sharad Mohol (who killed him) to require a top security jail. Qateel was to appear later on that Friday 8th June 2012 in the Pune court. The ATS had not found any culpable evidence against him in the Pune case and would have let the Delhi police take his custody. It is likely that he knew who had blown bombs in Pune German Bakery and it was a fatal cover up by the police. He was bumped off in the same way as Shahid Azmi was. Who would fear the truth revealed to the Delhi police?
If Qateel had taunted the dacoits and extortionists Alok Bhalerao and Sharad Mohol it would mean that he knew the real terrorists and would go on to tell it to the Delhi police. Given the location of five lock ups of three cells each in such high security set up it was impossible to kill him there. So the only way would be when the prisoners are brought into the open at 9.45 to 11.45 in the morning. It is but natural that at such a time there should have been even more tight security. And yet one of the two dacoits held Qateel’s legs and the other strangulated him. Even then the guards or the police did not come to know of the murder. It was only when one of the killers having told another prisoner who in turn told the guards of it that the news reached the ears of the authorities. Even if the close circuit camera were there the police would have conveniently lied as in so many other cases that the camera system was not working. So what we have here is extra judicial killing.
The police claim that Yaseen Bhatkal had given one lakh rupees for the treatment of Qateel’s daughter who later died. Now that the police in Delhi are interrogating Yaseen they should find out if he had really given one lakh to Qateel in addition to the one lakh he had sent to his wife on the occasion of Id that was celebrated on 9th August. When the police have 40 charges against Yaseen even before his arrest why they don’t have anything from him on his connection with Qateel and a host of other Muslim youths accused of being his associates!
How improbable it is that the police claim that Qateel had tried to plant the bomb at the temple but a florist refused to let him and so he took it all the way to the sea in Mumbai to dispose it off there! If Qateel was not involved in the Pune German Bakery case how could he have known where Yasin Bhatkal was hiding in Bihar. And after Yasin Bhatkal was arrested from the border region in Bihar on Wednesday 28th August 2013 why would the Bihar government refuse to register the crime and take custody of Yasin Bhatkal on 29th August?(1)
In this melee what hope is there for truth to see the light of the day? The only way for the truth to come out would be impartial inquiry by international bodies of repute. This is a way out as even David Richard Headley and Swami Asimanand have been either prevaricating or retracting whatever they have said. The Ministry of Home Affairs has also been hiding crucial information and facts like in the case of Intelligence Bureau special director Rajendra Kumar’s involvement in Ishrat Jahan case as well as many other cases. It is not only the Bihar government which is casting aspersion on Yasin Bhatkal arrest by its refusal to do anything with him. Qateel taunted Sharad Mohol and Alok Bhalerao which led to his killing but there was no one who saw the murder. So the question is still open as to who killed him. If the duo killed him who was behind them? The duo and Qateel were playing together, chatting and hobnobbing with each other well. Then how and what could go so wrong to lead to murder?(2) It could not be the taunt then that led to the murder. It could only be the fear that if the Delhi police which had arrested him a year before could come to know stark truth which the ATS did not want to share with it.
It is also unexplained till today why did not the ATS hand over Qateel to Delhi police on 29th May 2013 when his police custody ended. He had been in the custody of the police in Pune Yerwada jail from 1st May. There was enough time to have interrogated him in four weeks. Why did not the two so called ‘extremist nationalists’ kill him on 29th May itself.
The ATS prepared 81 pages of charge sheet in September 2012 in which it says that Qateel had threatened “second attempt” to blow the same temple. How could the police verify this and the court to judge? If nobody was present there in the notorious anda cell prison how could the ATS accept this when they had not accepted Qateel’s own insistence that he was not involved in crimes. In what way two criminals and dacoits are more reliable in jail than an innocent person? If the alleged threat to make second attempt was a boast why in heavens it should be taken as de facto intention of crime? There was little chance of Qateel ever coming out to commit a crime others have ascribed to him? Would he with no record of previous crimes threaten such second attempt? He would have been a fool to even think second attempt after having gone through the hell that is Indian jail for seven long months.(3)
Inexplicable is also the fact that Delhi police had arrested him on 22nd November 2011 and had him for more than five months to know all they wanted. Why did they not finish their job? Why did they not ascertain from him before handing him to another agency of another state? Why is the Hindu party BJP silent over this whole affair? Is the onus only on the Muslims all the time to struggle to prove their youths’ innocence?
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(1)
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/terror-suspect-killed-by-fellow-inmates-in-pune-jail/article3504634.ece
(2)
warrant-taunt-led-mohd-qateel-siddiqui-death-in-jail/1/200010.html
(3)
http://zeenews.india.com/news/maharashtra/siddiqui-killed-for-bragging-about-pune-temple-attack-cops_7981
Chapter 7
Hindutva Skylab of Gujarat falls along with lab assistant Vanzara
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh warned the nation on Independence Day August15, 2013 that the greatest danger to the country was from communalism. The people of the country hardly noted this warning as they are so much used to matters like endemic corruption and the scourge of rape. Given this ambience they could hardly think that the PM did not give a quotidian speech. But in essence that was not.
The prime minister was aware of the genocide of Muslims in 2002, the fake encounters and the use of religion based politics that the BJP was playing in an alarming manner. In direct opposition to him was the politics that Amit Shah and Narendra Modi were playing in attempting to eclipse the genocidal crimes as well as their involvement in the fake encounters. Thus a parallel system was at work. That is, the Hindutva juggernaut with its hidden agenda that included targeting Muslims as terrorist and the rest who found that unpalatable. The former believed them to be patriotic to the tune of their roguery as the last resort of patriotism. DG Vanzara the highest profiled police officer in Gujarat called it deshbhakti, love and devotion to the country.
For many years people of India had heard of the Hindutva experiment being made in Gujarat laboratory. They were also aware of the same experiment being replicated by Ashok Singhal of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, at least the threat of it. Now it is early sign that that experiment is tottering. It was brought about by the transfer of the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case from Gujarat to Maharashtra in order to facilitate the Hindutva higher ups to let another stalwart of its garrison fight the battle for Hindu rashtra. Narendra Modi alone could not handle all the fronts.
In this the most crucial role was played by Ram Jethmalani who saw that Amit Shah was not only given bail but also allowed to canvas in elections that took place in Gujarat and continue to fight for the upcoming 2014 election under his supervision in the biggest state of India, UP. It is the state which has Babri mosque demolished and a Ram temple coming up although in much staggered steps.
The Hindutva horde not only executed the pogroms and defended the accused in the murder and arson and loot they also had ace lawyers and public prosecutors especially inducted into the genocide, the arrests, the trials and manipulation of the legal system. Even the additional advocate general of the state of Gujarat Tushar Mehta instead of defending the victims would pass relevant information of the victims to Hindutva ideologue of RSS S Gurumurthy to ferry out points to prepare defense of the accused in the genocide in the courts across the country. But Additional Director General of police DG Vanzara was the first line of defense:
“I most respectfully would like to submit and state that I, along with my officers, stood beside this government like a bulwark whenever it faced an existential crisis in the past. When I, along with my officers, have been facing a similar crisis in my/our life/lives, it was expected of this government to reciprocate and firmly stand beside me and my officers with a similar vigour and determination, which to my utter shock and surprise, could not happen”
The existential threats came from first the man who was the prime minister of the country. AB Vajpayee wanted Modi removed but he succumbed to the pressure of the Hindutva core groups of supporters of the genocide and its architect, Modi. He exhorted the chief minister to do his rajdharm. Modi said he had complied with it. But Vanzara followed another path shown by another religious divine, Guru Gobind Singh. When his own existence was in danger Vanzara took a leaf from scripture of another religion, Sikhism. “Hence the only way for me and my officers is to adopt the path of Dharma as defined by Shri Guru Govind Singh, the tenth Divine Lord of Sikhs, who ordained to his disciples, "when all the ways and doors for getting justice are exhausted and closed, it is just (Dharma) to draw the sword." Thus Gujarat showed two different meanings of Dharma used by two sons of the soil. Had the constitutional law of the land prevailed there would have been a secular law in which homicide is a crime punished with death. But both the sons played the same tune through different pipes as the Modern day Nero was fiddling thanks to the subversion of justice.
It is quite clear that the pogroms of Muslims and the fake encounters in which mostly Muslims were killed followed one pattern. The innocent Muslims were blamed for the fire accident and the well planned pogroms were begun. According to Vanzara it was “the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding, and monitoring our actions from very close quarters.” He cannot afford to apply this only to the fake encounters for which he was arrest. It applies more the murder and mayhem in Naroda Patia where nearly 800 Muslims were herded into a dry well, petrol from above was poured on them and they were burnt alive. They were in such large a number that the commissioner of police PC Pande ordered that the dead bodies should be scattered all over the city of Ahmadabad to lessen the enormity of the pogroms. Pravin Togadia was sitting in the hospital of VHP boss of the city Jaideep Patel a doctor by profession and monitoring the situation as Maya Kodnan minister of children and women health was inciting the crowds of Hinds to kill, rape and burn the Muslims. When the killings subsided for the day in late evening Modi went on a watch tour of the areas. He blessed the women of Chharra community for having produced brave men to have handled the job. According to the most notorious murderer Babu Bajrangi Modi had visited the sites to shore up the zeal of the marauders so that they would do the same job next day and the day after. He had stipulated three days for the pogroms. A neutral court in India would like to see the pogroms and fake encounters as two sides of the same coin which they are. Natural justice demands and the failing courts have stigmatized India for the sorry past.
There is such a dimension of the events in Gujarat under Modi that only a full-fledged commission of inquiry of international repute could unearth the abysmal depth of horror and how it was covered up not just by Modi administration but that of Vajpayee at the centre. What Amit Shah did at state level LK Advani with tacit acquiescence of the Prime Minister of India did in the central government, issuing clean chits to Modi. This includes Vanzara’s own hospitality to the Hindu marauders who were arrested but he treated them to the gorgeous food in government guest house meant for class one officers and then in the evening he let the killers go home without registering crimes of genocide against any of them! Modi himself phoned Babu Bajrangi to surrender to police after hiding him from law in the Mount Abu government guest house! He saw to it that the petition of the widow Zakia Jafri was not entertained and when the court accepted it his SIT issued another clean chit to him.(1)
It is sinister on the part of Vanzara to forget that the highest number of police officers in the pogrom affected parts of the state were those very officers like himself and his immediate boss PP Pandey who were fully involved in the pogroms of Muslims and the cover up of the accused killers and rapists. The same also were active in the fake encounters. It is his shrewd nature to defend those very officers for the crimes of fake encounter and slur over the much more grievous crimes of genocide. Modi’s crime was that he awarded all those officers in the genocide cases who toed the government line and punished those who opposed his state policy of teaching Muslims a lesson. So how could his trusted lieutenant Vanzara claim now: “The most notable part of the whole episode is that they are made to suffer in the jails, inspite of the fact that they had been and are loyal soldiers of this government who fought incessant war against, Pakistan inspired terrorism with complete honesty, integrity and sincerity without falling prey to any of the mundane temptations.”
It is worth quoting at length what RB Sreekumar says in his open letter to Modi published on 17th September 2011.
“4/ Those, who got rewards for their alleged deviant services to you, include officers, who were given extension in service, good postings and post retirements lucrative assignments. They are persons like, (1) Shri G.Subbarao, (2) Shri Ashok Narayanan, (3) Dr. P.K.Mishra, (4) Shri P.K.Laheri, (5) Shri Sudhir Mankad, (6) Smt. Manjula Subramaniaman, (7) Shri K.C.Kapoor - all IAS officers and (8) Shri A.K.Bhargava, (9) Shri P.C.Pande, (10) Shri G.C.Raiger, (11) Shri M.K.Tandon, (12) Shri Deepak Swaroop, (13) Shri K.Nityanandam, (14) Shri A.K.Sharma, (15) Shr Shivanad Jha, (16) Shri Sudhir Sinha, (17) Shri D.G.Vanzara, (18) Shri S.S.Khandwawala, (19) Shri J.Mahapatra, (20) Shri O.P.Mathur, (21) Shri A.A.Saiyed, (22) Shri P.P.Pandey, (23) Shri Ashish Bhatia - all IPS officers, etc. Their specific alleged culpable role was graphically narrated in my VIth Affidavit to the Justice Nanavati Commission.
“5/- As you know among the govt. officials, who were victims of unwarranted punishments by your govt., myself lead the list. Ever since I presented facts about riots "falsifying" the State Govt. version to the Central Election Commission on 9.8.2002, I was issued with memos on trivial matters like Control Room Head Constable sending a secret message by fax to field officers, without my knowledge, by ACS (Home) Sh.Ashok Narayanan. Further the Govt. started an inquiry against me for writing to CP Ahmedabad Sh.K.R.Kaushik, about the alleged planting of weapons (fire arms) by DIG Sh.D.G.Vanzara, the then i/c of Ahmedabad City Crime Branch on a few Muslims of Dariapur on 2002 Rathyatra day. You may please note that this was the only adverse report about alleged illegal acts of Vanzara, in Gujarat Police records before his arrest for alleged fake encounter in April, 2007. Instead of probing into my information about Sh.Vanzara, the Chief Secretary started an inquiry against me, for punishing me even though the then DGP Sh.K.Chakravarthi reported that my act of reporting against Sh.Vanzara was part of my normal duties and so could not me treated as misconduct. Sir, had you checked Sh.Vanzara and monitored his work, accepting my report, he would not have indulged in alleged extra judicial killings of innocent people. Now these cases have brought bad name for your administration and Gujarat Police. This was an instance of saving a thief (chor) and punishing the policeman (kotwal), who pointed a finger at the thief.”(2)
The penchant of Modi and Vanzara was the pet idea of blaming Pakistan even when there is no incident involving that country, even fighting election in Gujarat became a clash between Mian Musharaf and Modi. The hard fact is that Pakistan did not have time to wash its dirty linen in Gujarat politics. So how could the fake encounters be at the behest of Pakistan or inspired by ISI? The four cases Vanzara mentions in his letter of resigning from the post of additional director general of police in protest are that of Ishrat Jahan and three others, Sohrabuddin, his wife Kauser and friend Tulsiram Prajapati, Sadiq Jamal Mahtar. These were not just fake encounters but real terrorism. If Italian extremists kidnap former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and kill him and this is recognized as an act of terrorism, India must also learn that falsely accusing innocent people and killing them was also terrorism. There are also more skeletons likely to fall down from the wardrobe of Modi. A senior police officer Sanjiv Bhatt has expressed his apprehension that Modi may be behind the murder of Haren Pandya for which eleven innocent Muslims had to languish in prison for more than half a dozen years.
Therefore the experiment that Modi and Vanzara along with other government and police officers made in the Gujarat laboratory of Hindutva was of far more serious and dangerous nature than people are willing to accept. Vanzara’s letter of resignation on Tuesday 3rd September 2013 is early straw in the wind.
The experiment in the laboratory may have been interrupted by the letter but it would resume nevertheless.
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(1)Tehelka 3November 2007.
(2) Countercurrent 17 September 2011.
Chapter 8
Asif Basheer Khan Accused in 7/11 Mumbai blasts in local trains
The Anti Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra tortured Asif Basheer Khan in the most inhuman way: threat of raping mother and wife in his presence in the prison. On 8th August 2013 he told the MCOCA court in Mumbai that the police had already applied third degree torture and forced him to implicate himself in the blasts of 11 July 2006. He refused in the most trying situation in his life. But they continued torturing him and threatened to bring his mother and wife and rape them inside the Kala Ghoda office of ATS if he did not sign on the confession paper they put before him. Even then he refused. In this way he was implicated in Malegaon blasts of 8th September 2006 as well.(1)
The ATS foisted a very ingenuous method of sensationalizing his arrest. He was arrested from Mira Road in Thane because when he had been Jalgaon he was a member of SIMI. The police gave it in the paper that a cab driver had identified him as the suspect who boarded the train at Church gate and planted the bomb. He had alighted from the taxi at Church gate on 11th July 2006 and had to pay 180 rupees as fare for travelling from Bandra. The driver did not have change so in a hurry he gave away 500 rupee note. The police calculated that this would appear a very plausible cogent cause of arrest and accusation. How could he forget the face of his large hearted benefactor and his largess! Two months later the ATS was allegedly inquiring about the passenger who boarded the train at Church gate on the fateful day. The cops claim that they found the cabbie who later identified him.
On 13 August2013 Asif told the court that the identity parade was held on 7th November 2006 in Arthur road jail. The officer who conducted the parade said he was the code numbered 631officer sent by the government of Maharashtra. But years later Asif applied for information of 631 it turned out that that officer was from Kokan named Shashikant. Therefore the officer who really conducted the parade committed impersonation which is a crime. And so the testimony of those who gave witness in identifying him cannot be legally acceptable. The officer who committed impersonation gave one name in the papers on identity and had another name in the ATS; he was not Shashikant from Ratnagiri. (2)
What is more the same special executive officer had also conducted the identity parade of the other accused and hence it was illegal and also criminal in their cases too.
In this way Asif Basheer Khan struggled hard and patiently to prove that he was innocent. He was framed in bogus charges of terror by the ATS. ATS’ modus operandi is the same very vulgar violation of chastity of the family members through threats coercing the accused into submission as this was also used in the case of Muzammil Akhtar accused for 13 March 2003 local train attack where ATS succeeded in making the accused confess what he had not done actually.
The ramification of Asif’s attack requires a commission of inquiry by the parliament or an international body of jurists. His real cause of arrest was no illegal act except that nearly six years ago the government had banned SIMI and he had been a member of SIMI in Jalgaon years ago, before migrating to Mumbai and taking a job of civil engineer in the metropolis. The police accused him for storing RDX and supplying it to the accused in 7/11 bombing as well as in September 2006 blasts in Malegaon. This stored RDX was the remnant of the huge amount of arms and RDX seized in Malegaon, Aurangabad and Ankari in May 2006. It is now becoming clear that the Hindutva terrorists of the Sunil Joshi and Lt Col Prasad Purohit modules were behind the use of RDX and the blasts.
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(1)Inquilab 9-8-2013
(2)Inquilab 14-8-2013
Chapter 9
Abrar
Ahmad conundrum of Malegaon blasts September 2006
It is true
that many innocent youths of Muslim community were framed in bogus charges of
terrorism but by no means could this be taken to mean that the police informers
were also innocent. If such Muslim police informers receive money and only
supply intelligence that enhances security then it is one thing but if they
play in the hands of the police and frame other Muslims (who are innocent) in
false charges of terrorism then it is serious matter. Abrar Ahmad accused in
September 8, 2006 blasts in Malegaon is instance of it.
It would
be naïve to take Abrar Ahmad at face value when he says:
“I never
worked for the ATS. I was caught in a situation where I found myself at the
mercy of the ATS officers. I was forced to implicate innocent people into the
terrorism cases. I destroyed a number of lives. I am ashamed of myself. I
became a toy in the hands of the ATS. They misled the investigation.” There is
need to search phone record if the police called him at Ram Setu bridge on September
13, 2006 when they put him on record. He was searched and recorded to be having
wire with him at that time. If he is really innocent his contact with the
police must begin with this first meeting. But if there is phone record dating
back then he is the first Muslim involved in a conspiracy of this magnitude
where the Hindutva terrorists blew bombs and police were complicit in
implicating him and several others in not just one but other cases of terrorism.
There is also one ‘Ahmad’ in the arms haul case of May 2006. Who is this
single-word man?
Another
thing that needs careful scrutiny is his exact relationship with the additional
Superintendent of Police Raj Vardhan Sinha. He asserts: “He(Sinha) took me to
Nashik. A few days later, he told me that some local newspapers had carried
news reports that I was a police informer so it would be dangerous for me to
visit Malegaon.” It is not convincing that such a senior officer will have such
a character to repair his inverter at Nasik for which better mechanics were
available in the district town itself. Why should the ASP shield him from local
people’s ire if Abrar was really innocent? This is a flimsy pretext on which
the ASP should send him on a junket of Jaora, Ujjain and other places in MP and
also Maharashtra. Why would the ATS of Maharashtra spend money on him and keep
him as guest in temples and hotels? If ATS cop Arun introduced him to Pragya
Singh Thakur in Dewas then it naturally implies that he was in touch with the
Sunil Joshi module. How come a stranger to ASP Sinha be taken in the loop of a
much larger conspiracy involving the Sadhvi and the Lt Col Prasad Purohit who
played so destructive terrorist role two years later? He met the Sadhvi again
in Byculla jail when she was arrested and sent there in November 2008. In the
meantime he also travelled at the expense of the police to Saputara in Gujarat
and Deolali camp in Nasik. It was in the artillery cantonment that he met
Purohit on October 22, 2006.
Why
should Purohit say what he actually said to Abrar: 'You will be given land and
property anywhere in India except Kashmir.' If Abrar was a novice then why did
the army man promise this largess? The
more Abrar says the deeper is his involvement: “I was taken to the ATS office
in Byculla. I was first taken to the office of Subodh Jaiswal [then additional
commissioner of police; now joint secretary at cabinet secretariat]. He told me
that I didn't need to worry about the news reports about me. Then I was taken
to the office of K.P. Raghuvanshi [then chief of ATS; now Thane police
commissioner]. He put ∃5 lakh in front of me and said that it
was my money. He said if I wouldn't take it my brother-in-law Farooq would get
it. Meanwhile, Rajwardhan brought Farooq, and he was given that money. After
that, the cops took me to Nashik, where I was kept at Muktidham temple. Inside
the temple some people were making a video film of all those who were present
there and I was not comfortable getting filmed. Later, on December 13, 2006, I
was taken to Bhiwandi and we stayed there. I met Farooq at the ATS office in
Kalachowki the next day. He told me that the ATS had kept their promises. They
had given us all the promised money. But I was shocked when he and my wife left
me at the ATS office. After they left, the cops suddenly started thrashing me.
I realised that they had got all the money and they played a double game with
me. I was produced in court on December 22, 2006 as an approver in the Malegaon
case.” He says that his brother in law Farooq Verdha received twenty five lakh
rupees from the police and that he (Abrar) also had received money from ATS
cops whom he names as Sachin Kadam, Mahesh Kadam and Sadashiv Abhimanyu Patil. But
then he refused money since 2009 because his lawyer brother Jailil told him not
to take more money or else he would be in trouble.(1)
By no means Abrar can
be absolved if what he said holds water: “I
destroyed a number of lives. I am ashamed of myself.” He has confessed on
his own volition therefore he is
blaming himself for the destruction (killing and injuring) of a number of
lives. This surely refers to those who lost their life and limbs in the blasts.
That he implicated the other accused in the blasts of 2006 that were also given
bail along with him. Therefore his regret and remorse is for the innocent
killed and injured.
Furthermore, according to my book Aggressive Hindutva Terrorism and Malegaon, Abrar is a Janus
figure. He looks backward and regrets and when he looks forward he prepares
ground for his defense, to save his skin.
This he does by prevarication. He said that he had met Purohit on October 22,
2006 and then subsequently denied it.(2)
A reporter who interviewed him in November 2012 refused to rule out that he is
a bluff who mislead everyone. The pivot on which this approach rests is that
the ATS may have used him to frame innocent Muslims (supposed to be 11) and
then played a double game of framing him ultimately. This raises a serious
question as to whether the ATS and Raj Vardhan Sinha prepared a parallel plot.
This would mean the Hindutva terrorists planned to bomb Malegaon 2006 and 2008,
Samjhauta Express February 2007, Mecca mosque May 2007, Ajmer 2007. The police
in Malegaon and the ATS of Maharashtra gave a cover and also diverted the
investigation to shield the Hindutva terrorists. This is evident even in the
latest situation. First Judge YD Shinde of MCOCA court in Mumbai did not
entertain Abrar’s affidavit of April 18, 2009 in which he had mentioned such
details. Then he gave interview to The Week which startled the NIA but they
stalled the investigation because it was beyond their power as the case of 2006
impinges upon 2008 in Malegaon where the army is involved. As if that is not
enough the chief of ATS KP Raghuvanshi and Subodh Kumar Jaiswal both are
directly involved. What is even worse for the government the cover up of Abrar
if it could be called that also includes the secret plan of removing Hemant
Karkare who ultimately fell victim to that.
But circumstancing it to Malegaon alone there is enough trouble
for all. One, Abrar had reportedly received 65 lakh rupees from the master mind
of the terrorist organization in Mumbai. [see the facsimile of Urdu Times, October 16, 2006] With this
booty in the dickey of his brand new Hero Honda he rode to Malegaon from Mumbai
crossing the terrain that covers 300 kilometers. (3)That
astronomical amount to the cash starved accused comes in the wake of huge
amount of money Mahesh Patodiya allegedly withdrew from Mamco bank in Malegaon.
The sorry state of investigation has come to such a pass
that the moment Abrar accused the ATS boss Raghuvanshi and Subodhkumar Jaiswal
even the NIA threw the spanner in the work. The Ministry of Home Affairs also
is complicit in this as it is in its reluctance to expose its own special
director Rajendra Kumar in Ishrat Jahan fake encounter. In the Malegaon case
the situation would demand handcuffing of ATS boss as a conspirator along with
now the joint secretary at cabinet secretariat Subodh Kumar Jaiswal. This is beyond
the competence of any court in India to order hence the need for trial by an international
body of jurists.
The report in the paper says that Abrar enticed others to
join in the plot saying that it would be a minor explosion that would frighten
the people but not injure or kill them. It would only cause stampede. But the
crucial point is that the report written on October 15, 2006 contextualizes what
was taking place in Malegaon and would take place later. For example at this
precise time middle of October 2006 just over a month after the blasts the
police had called for questioning three doctors, obviously Salman Farsi, Farog
Magdume, and one more. The first two doctors were arrested later and were put
in prison for more than 5 years. This at the instance of Abrar! He played
mischief with them by giving their names to police. This surely is perjury and
punishable with even death penalty.
A day before on October 14, 2006 many agitated people went
to his house and complained against what Abrar had done. His family felt
humiliated but assured that they would be through with him on that issue. The
people were disturbed at his sell out of his millat, community. But the
gravamen of the circumstancing is that a day before DGP PS Pasricha had
remarked in Delhi that the police had caught the man behind the explosions of
bombs in Malegaon (supposedly Abrar) but he did not name him. This had greatly
perturbed the native people because they rightly feared that Abrar had
certainly named those Muslims whom the police had been calling to police
stations for questioning. This milieu led to hypertension in the people that
innocents would be framed is imminent. That came true. Such strong was the
conviction among the people that they remained steadfast in this for all the
years that their innocent young men were languishing in jail. That was the main
reason why they organized a sit in for years together. Raghuvanshi put pressure
on the accused to dissociate with the movement of sit ins in the city. This
corroborates his guilty behavior. The Janta Dal leader Nihal Ahmad knew this
well and hence the police were with loggerheads with him. He was behind the sit
ins.
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(1)
All the quotes are sourced from http://www.manoramaonline.com/cgi-bin/MMOnline.dll/portal/ep/theWeekContent.do?contentId=12855615&programId=1073755753&tabId=13&BV_ID=@@@&categoryId=-189461
NIA puzzled as Malegaon blast witness flip-flops - Times Of India
(3)
Urdu times
October 16, 2006.
Chapter 10
“From the day of my arrest [on May 7, 2003] till
today I am in custody without any relief [and no trial]”
Mustafa Khan
That is what he wrote in the third week of September
2013 in a letter home for the world to know what he has suffered.
Muzammil Akhtar
Abdul Rahim Ansari of Malegaon was arrested on May 7, 2003 for local train
blasts at Mulund, Mumbai on March 13, 2003. He has been languishing in the
Thane Jail without his case making any progress in the court. Aged 26 at the
time of his arrest he is now 37. He has not been given even five minutes to
visit his house even for attending the funeral of his sister.
Shahenaz Akhtar lived with her brother in a room
next to his in Kurla, Mumbai. Muzammil shared his room with boys and she with
girls. She would cook and call him through the window and both would sit
together and eat like they did at home in their native town. On the day the
police arrested him from his office of Agog Pharma Company in Vasai New Bombay
she had kept the food ready but he did not come and she went hungry. She called
home and they told her that he was sick in hospital. She continued teaching in
school without even remotest though that she would ever see his face in her
life again. For months on end the family sustained her with the excuse. She
pined for him and beseeched to let her know the name of the hospital so she
could go and see him. Even her mother was not told the truth. She too lived
with anxiety and pain that her first born was in hospital. Months passed and
then they came to know that he had been arrested on what turned out to be false
charge of terrorism. Shahenaz’s soul traumatized with shock because she knew
her brother was by no means what the police described. Their mother could not
bear it and lost sleep and could not shut the lids of her eyes while weeping
and crying and sighing all the time. She even almost lost her vision as she
could not shut the eyes and could not recognize her other children. However
impaired in vision she slightly recovered. The sister could not meet her
brother nor could the mother her son. Shahenaz could not bear the loss and died
in grief three years later. Both the sources of income stopped. The family
fought at two fronts: ailment of the daughter and the legal battle which had
begun even before the trial started. More than ten years have passed it has not
begun even this late.
On May 14, 2003 the ATS presented him in court where
for the first time he was told that he was arrested for the Mulund blast on the
local train. Till then he was given third degree torture.
In the long incarceration Muzammil was stupefied for
a long time but then realized that he owes an existential obligation to his
life. He also used right to information act to collect facts about the
circumstances of his arrest and what the police had done. He was implicated in
POTA Special Case No 02/03. It consists of three cases:
(1) Mulund bomb blast vide DCB-CID CR No 21/03
(2) Vile Parle bomb blast vide DCB-CID CR No 09/03
(3) Mumbai Centra bomb blast vide DCB-CID CR No
59/03.
The police have simply forsaken him for good as they
have failed to frame charges against him till today. In all 16 people were
accused in the Special Case No 02/03. Almost all except him have been either
discharged or given bail. All have been falsely implicated. The police have
prepared charge sheet in which according to him the evidence is fabricated and
concocted. From his cell in the prison he now wants the world to know how the
evidence is fabricated and concocted so that another agency now the National
Investigation Agency should conduct a fresh investigation because he believes
that he is innocent. He has enumerated several grounds on which NIA should take
the case for reinvestigation.
First, different police officers have been appointed
as Investigation Officer (IO) for the three cases mentioned above. But it is
absolute truth according to him that only Rakesh Maria who was in charge of the
Crime Branch till the death of Hemant Karkare investigated his case. This is
unlawful for the designated three officers never took the case in their hands.
Maria now ATS chief carried the day with him as he is awfully influential and
resourceful in the Maharashtra government says Muzammil based on his empirical
observation. He is filled with apprehension that these police officers will
thwart his case from being transferred to NIA.
Once in the beginning their father had gone to see
his son at Crawford Market police station. He was detained and put in prison
for a week. During that time the police undressed him and brought Muzammil
there and told Muzammil to confess that he planted the bomb or else his mother
and sister would also be disrobed similarly and abused. Sensing the humiliating
proximity of his father and his sister not far from there he wept and wept and
signed his fate. It was in his fate that he would be in prison for more than
ten years and he an innocent!
Second, Maria had also investigated POTA Special
Case No 01/03 which deals with bomb blast in a bus at Ghatkoper railways
station. All the accud in that case have been discharged. One of the reasons
for Muzammil’s arrest was that he had a talk with Dr Mateen of Aurangabad who
was the main accused. The police could not prove it. Another accused in the case
was Khwaja Yunus who was beaten so much that he vomited blood, Dr Mateen wrote
to the court that he would not survive
the blood vomiting. Later Khwaja Yunus was taken out and mysteriously killed by
inspector Sachin Vaze of ATS and his body was never found.
Third, in the Karjat bound local train there was a
bomb blast at 7.56 pm on March 13, 2003 as the train was entering Mulund. The
police say that Muzammil was identified to be present in the train as it left
CST or VT terminus. This is concocted for his phone record shows that he was in
Kurla at his rooms at 7. 56 on March 13, 2003. The police have included a page
of the phone record in the charge sheet that is simply doctored as can be seen
in the photo copy. Its sequential order even does not show any sense of
chronology let alone the facts. That proves the fabrication of evidence. This doctoring was done to hide the
location. He was in Kurla and not at CST or in the train.
Fourth, one of the witnesses says that he saw
Muzammil put a bag and while doing it he accidentally let a bag of another
passenger fall down from the rack that led to a quarrel. How could he be there
when he was actually at his Kurla rooms?
Fifth, the police have manipulated the eye witness
statement by inserted “supplements” [purawni]. The Page numbers have been
tampered with to implicate him falsely. He has attached sections of this
tampering in the letter a copy of which is with this writer.
Sixth, if one of the eye witnesses gave details of 4
persons who planted the bomb on the train of which Muzammil was one, and then
who are the remaining three. Why is there no mention of them? How does this
corroborate with the facts.
Seventh, the charge sheet does not say who procured
the explosives and how they were transported to CST. Where from the explosives
were sourced is also left out from the investigation as it is not given in the
charge sheet. There is not even the remotest possibility of Muzammil doing it
for he lived with those including his sister he would not do any such thing. It
is also unthinkable that he would continue to live there when other blasts also
shook the city and he attending his office for two months as if nothing had
happened!
Eighth, Zahid Patni is one of the accused in POTA
Special Case No 1/04. Patni who also became approver never retracted from his
confession. He also said that he was behind the Mulund blast. But neither Patni
nor anyone from his group has been charged for the Mulund blast.
Ninth, in the Vile Parle bomb blast case two
witnesses identified Muzammil who they said had parked the cycle on which the
bomb was placed. The other person accused in this case is one Yusuf, a wanted
accused. The two witnesses are friends and they met at Vile Parle but went to
buy vegetables where they saw Muzammil parking the cycle and there was an
altercation with some people there over parking. The vegetable market is so
crowded and busy that it is impossible to park cycle there. Moreover the
witness statement was recorded on May 22, 2003. It was got-up witness, an
afterthought.
Tenth, Muzammil wears dark specs all through those
years and now as can be seen in this set of two photos with his fellow
students. The sketch of the suspected bomber given by the police shows him to
be wearing no spectacles.
.
Muzammil
Eleventh, the cycle shop owner who had repaired the
cycle, particularly paddles and the rim, gave a statement which was completely
changed afterward. Why?
Twelfth, the charge sheet is silent about the other
bomb planter at Vile Parle. Muazmmil was nowhere near Vile Parle at that time.
The person whose phone numbers are given as 9892469942 and 9892183615 here is
the wanted Yusuf aka Janab. As a co planter he was nowhere there as can be seen
from his phone record.
Thirteenth, Muzammil was arrested from his office on
May 7, 2003. But his colleague gave statement that he was arrested on 14th.
Everyone in his office knows the truth that he was taken away on 7th.
That shows how the police tutored his colleague to give false witness. It is as
false as the colleague saying that the police had come to office on May 13 to
make inquiry about Muzammil. Why should this give statement 44 days after his
illegal detention and 5 months after the bomb blast! More puzzling is that the
same colleague also said that he had seen Muzammil near the site of the blast!
Fourteenth, the police have said in their record
that the co accused Yusuf met Muzammil in the clinic of Dr Wahid on January 22nd
and 23rd, 2003 and they decided to meet at 6.30 pm on January 27th
2003 near Vile Parle railway station or near Bus Stop No 312. The police say
that Muzammil was waiting for Yusuf when the colleague named Rohit saw him
there. Rohit asked him what he was doing there. Muzammil told him he was
waiting for someone, Rohit went away. At
7 to 7.30 on January 27th Yusuf came there and according to police
version gave Muzammil a bag and told him there was a bomb in it. It weighed 5
kilo. It was destined to blow at Vile Parle. Then the two went to the vegetable
market close to the railway station. There he showed a cycle on the left side
of the road and told Muzammil to hang the bag containing the bomb from the
handle of the cycle. After having done so, as the police narration continues,
he boarded bus no 330 and went back to his rooms in Kurla. Next day Muzammil
read in the paper that the bomb had gone off there. The police claim this to
have been the fact according to Muzammil in his confession which has been
certified by the deputy commissioner of police. This confession was obtained
through excruciating circumstances as shown earlier.
Muzammil writes in his letter on it: “It is
impossible for me to meet wanted accused Yusuf on 22nd or 23 rd
January 2003 at/in Dr Wahid Ansari’s clinic, as Dr Wahid’s Clinic does not
exist on 22nd or 23 January 2003. Since Dr Wahid has acquired his
Clinic at D’Souza Nagar in March 2003.
“Thus, when the said clinic at D’souza Nagar of Dr
Wahid was acquired in March 2003, how I shall visit the Clinic on 22nd
or 23rd January 2003.” In support of his claim Muzammil gives a
photo copy which is shown on page no 1125 of the charge sheet. Furthermore,
there is no call exchanged between him and Yusuf or Dr Wahid before March 2003
as is shown in the phone call record of Muzammil no 98921906506. For the first
time Muzammil talked to Dr Wahid was on April 5th 2003.
The phone record of Yusuf’s 9892469942 shows him to
be at Mumbra and not at D’Souza Nagar at6.30 to 8.30 pm on January 27th
2003 which is the day and time of the incident of explosion at Vile Parle where
one person died and 25 were injured. The exact time of the incident is 8.30 pm
Monday January 27, 2003. Thus in all probability Yusuf is a police informer
used in falsely implicating Muzammil in the Vile Parle case.
Because they were Muslims they were framed in false
terror charges
--a
non communal approach
Extremist
groups like Abhinav Bharat and RSS and its affiliates
took lead in planting bombs
and sourcing RDX from government stock in army
A cool logical review of terrorism cases down the
last twenty five years shows that in a majority of cases of terrorism Muslim
youths have been framed. Unless driven to the wall in a desperate situation
devoid of hope of survival and police bias against them as well as police
complicity in the crimes against them and the situation beggaring the resources
of their legitimate self defense that the Muslims would think of taking to
terrorism. On the contrary the Hindutva terrorism is aggressive and based on
tacit support of the police and even the army and is paranoid in reaction.
Malegaon was again in the news as the seventh
anniversary of the blasts in graveyard mosque and Mushawarat chowk was being
marked on 8th September 2013and the passing of the seven years and
more of the arms seizure leave no sign of hope or resolution of the case. The
three cases of terrorism of which one is called arms seizure case of 9th
May 2006, first bomb blasts of 8th September 20006 and the second of
29th September 2008 illustrate very amusing disregard of logic in
dealing with terrorism. These three cases and the 7/11 local train case, etc,
have one theme that recurs. There was arms seizure in three places: Malegaon,
Ankai and Aurangabad-Verul road side temple on 9th May 2006. The
Anti Terrorism Squad says the RDX seized in these places was very huge and the
remnant of it went to the blasts in the local trains in Mumbai on 11th
July 2006 and also in the blasts in Malegaon 2006. One of the 9 accused and
sometimes approver Abrar Ahmad accused that the police had forced him to
implicate innocent Muslims in the smuggling of saman or RDX into the city. Thus five Muslims from Malegaon Dr
Sharif Shabbir Ahmad, Afzal Khan Nabi Khan, Mushtaque Ahmad Mohammad Ishaque,
Javid Ahmad Abdul Majid and Riyaz Ahmad Mohammad Ramzan were arrested in the
arms seizure and several others including Mohammad Ali Sheikh and Firoz Khan
and 7 of Malegaon were arrested for 2006 blasts in Malegaon. These last two
were also implicated in the 7/11 blasts.
The ATS had information that two cars, Indica No.MH
20-U 1240 and Tata Sumou No. MH-13X4380 were carrying arms and RDX on the way
from Pimpalgaon to Malegaon and Aurangabad. There were five boxes in the Indica
and 10 in Tata Sumou. The size of the boxes of brown colour were
Height 1
foot, 11 inches
Breadth 2
feet 7 inches
Length 2 feet
7 inches
It would be
impossible for five boxes to be put in the Indica much more impossible to put
the arms and ammunition into the server within the cartons. It is also
unresolved why the ATS has so far failed to produce the Indica in the court as
proof. It was recovered from a deserted place on the outskirts of Malegaon. The
owners of Indica have also said that it was not rented from them.
Dr
Sharif’s phone No 9226701250 call records of 9th May 2006 shows zero
in coming call from Bilal Ahmad 9850019310. In the same way of the same time
there is no outgoing call from Bilal to Sharif. Except this the prosecution has
not shown any contact between the two.
Sharif and Bilal phone call records
So the purported message of Bilal to Sharif that
Sharif should help Amir bhai makes no sense. The message reads; amirbhai musibat maen hai police uska peecha
kar rahi hai. Indica car mein computer aur saman hai. Us ko madad karo. “Amir
bhai is in trouble. The police are shadowing him. There are computers and
samans [weapons and RDX] in the computer. Help him.”
Zabiudin Ansari (Abu Jindal) was at Pimpalgaon and
he travelled to Malegaon in the Indica and left the car with Sharif who
transferred the consignment of the five cartons in a rickshaw and drove to the
electric shop of Abdullah. If the cartons could not be adjusted in Indica with
three men riding in it how could they be loaded into an ordinary rickshaw with
two men aboard? How come there is no record of their having paid octroi duty
when the box would have been so protruding and visible to the staff of the
octroi post!
The ATS did not do panchnama at the Abdullah shop
nor did it arrest the owner although the said consignment was recovered from
his shop. Furthermore the ATS brought two witnesses from Mumbai. That is
clearly violation of the rules which makes it necessary to make panchnama or
registration of the crime or seizure in the presence of the neighbours.
A more astounding feature is that Zabiuddin was a
police informer and he is reputed to have unearthed the biggest arms haul for
the police in a decade. How come then that he trapped Sharif and others and to
what end? (1). Why did he abandon the Indica in
Malegaon and travel to Aurangabad in a state transport bus?
Between Pimpalgaon and Malegaon as well as between
Pimpalgaon and Aurangabad the ATS had several check points and traffic barriers
so why did they not stop the cars? The police could have easily stopped the
cars and seized the arms and arrested the people within the cars. Even if the
cars were speeding fast they could send messages to their other check posts and
have the cars stopped searched and seized.
Of other accused there is the case of Asif Basheer
Khan. The police said that he stored the RDX in his house in Mira Road, Thane.
This was part of the same RDX that the two cars were carrying. Asif is accused
of supplying the RDX which went in the blasts in Malegaon 2006 and the serial
train attacks of the same year in Mumbai in July. The accused in the arms haul
cases and even the local train blasts cases have had no contact either on their
phone or through email with each other. Therefore the arms haul case is bogus.
The 2006 blasts in Malegaon have turned out to be the work of Hindutva
terrorists and the police have arrested Rajndra Chowdhary, Lokesh Sharma, Amit,
and Manohar Singh. These belong to the Sunil Joshi module hence logically
speaking it should be the Hindutva group/s that must be behind the source of
the RDX that was used in Malegaon 2006, Mumbai July 2006 blasts. It was about
handling and bringing it in Malegaon that ASP Raj Vardhan Sinha wanted to be recorded
in such a way that Mohammad Zahid Abdul Majid should be framed. Sinha not only
got Abrar record the conversation on his phone [that was provided by Sinha] but
he also played the recording for Lt Col Prasad Purohit to listen in Jagtap farm
house in Nasik in September 2006.(2) As
Sinha used Abrar so did the ATS used the police agent from Beed, Jabi or
Zabiuddin Ansari to trap fellow Muslims in the transport of the RDX and the
weapons on May 9, 2006.
The police has also bungled in investigation and
botched up the cases. It follows the inductive logic premise:
A. Arms haul case is fake.
B. Blasts
in local trains were carried out with the remnant RDX of May 2006 arms haul
vintage.
C. Therefore
the serial blasts case is also bogus.
The concluding
inference of the syllogism will show that other terrorist modules were involved
in the blasts in which innocent Muslims were arrested in for ferrying the RDX
and arms.
There are two other reasons why the people arrested
in these cases were innocent. They were framed by the police. (A) The affidavit
of Shakeel Ahmad Mohammad Yusuf of Malegaon clearly indicates it. Shakeel is
employed in joining warp threads on power looms which is a humble roving job.
He executed an affidavit on November 20, 2006. He states that he went to buy a
bicycle on May 14, 2006 at 3.30 from Santosh cycle mart. There was the son of the owner Pius Agarwal at
the counter. “I bought a new cycle in the name of my brother with receipt no
2635. After the bargain was over and the cycle was being fitted I sat inside
the shop. There was a phone call on Pius’ mobile. First there was a coded
interaction then somebody spoke in Hindi .
“‘Whatever
material we had put in the well near Ankai hillock was lifted in the presence
of Rajwardhan[ ASP Raj Verdhan Sinha]. And whatever list of names we had given
to Rajwardhan I had a face to face talk with him over it. All the names have
been fitted in the setting completely and every work has been accurately done.
We will sit together and prepare further programme when we meet.’ Because I had
read in newspapers about the seizure of arms and RDX from near Ankai hillock I
asked him what his relation is with the seizure of arms from there. You were
just now talking about it. He was surprised greatly. He asked me whether I was listening
to their talk. Then he said in hurry that it was their personal matter they
were talking.
“Then he told me that if I would wait there his
father would come and prepare and give me the bill. After saying this he left
the shop. His father came after 15 minutes and prepared the bill and handed it
to me.
“When the bombs exploded in the graveyard [in
Malegaon on September 8, 2006] and I came to know through newspapers that the
cycle on which the blast was carried out was bought from his shop I felt that
the son of the owner may be involved in it.
“I went to the ASP Anil Kumbhar along with MLA
Shaikh Rashid and gave all this information to him. But I realized that no
action was taken on the information I had given.
“Therefore I am stating this fact without any greed
or under any pressure to help the police investigate the matter and the real
culprits are caught.”
(B) The other is a set of technical details that create doubt about the arms haul case vis-à-vis bomb blasts of 2006. Why did Sinha record the transport of saman or RDX and arms on the phones of Abrar and implicate Mohammad Zahid Abdul Majid? Purohit had stolen 60 kg of RDX from the army stock. What did he do with the huge stock apart from giving a few kilos to Bhagwan for Samjahuta Express explosions? Why did the police not seize Indica immediately when it was moving around the city of Malegaon for three days? Purohit says that he kept his senior informed about what he was doing. But the army refused to name that officer, why? (3)
In the larger context of terrorism in India it is
relevant to note that Purohit was in touch with Dyanand Pandey as the latter
was in contact with Bhupender Singh and Rajive Sharma. Both were members of
Bajrang Dal who had blown themselves up in Kanpur on August 24, 2008. Such was
the terrific explosion that the senior most police officer there remarked that
there was so much of RDX that it would have blown half of Kanpur to
smithereens! Quite true in view of the fact that in addition to 60 kilos of RDX
from the army Purohit must have also sourced the explosives from Shanker Shelke
in a village not far from Pune and much closer to the artillery cantonment of
Ahmedager who had 195 kilos of it when he committed suicide soon after 2006
Malegaon blasts. The police commissioner of Thane at that time who knew
Ahmednager had said that the Malegaon blasts were connected to the arms of haul
from Shelke’s scrap-yard. First Shelke disappeared after the blasts and two
days later hanged himself. Or was it murder?
Purohit has also been engaged in camouflaging the
reign of terror he and his associates had unleashed on Muslims. He got the name
of Venkatesh Takalki changed to Praveen Mutalik to avoid detection. He had
asked Tkalki to surf the net on bomb making. Purohit used different groups of
RSS such as the Tigers in Karnataka. (4) Thus the handling of huge amount of RDX circa
2006 and 2008 was done by the Hindutva terrorists and not the Muslims. Muslims
had to be framed in false terror charges to camouflage what the Hindutva groups
were doing.
The police in Malegaon played a proactive role
against the Muslims. They arrested five from Malegaon in the arms haul case.
The details point out that Zabiuddin played a dominant role in the arms haul
although he was a police informer. It was he at the Sumou Tata. Aamir
introduced the inmates of the Indica to him and called him Zabiuddin.
Thereafter Zabiuddin took over the command operation. He told Mujaffar driver
of Indica to follow the Sumou Tata. Three to four kilo meters from Pimpalgaon
Zabiuddin gave hand to Indica drive to stop by the side of the road where a
container of Aysher Company was parked. There were two men standing by the side
of the container. It was again Zabiuddin who talked to them and then told them
to unload 10 to12cartons from the container into the Sumou. Then he told the
driver Azim to drive towards Aurangabad. He got five cartons loaded into the Indica
and got in the Indica and told Mujaffar to drive towards Malegaon. He also
phoned Aamir how far they had traversed on the way to Aurangabad. At Malegaon
Zabiuddin introduced the others in the car to Dr Sharif. He handed over the
Indica to Dr Sharif and told him to keep the consignment at the entrance, RMO’s
room, of the gate of Mansoora campus. He
also told Mujaffar to go to Aurangabad by another bus while he took a separate
bus to the same destination. From there he was reported to have fled to Bangle
Desh. Thus a police informer played
such crucial role in transport of the RDX and arms as he had done in unearthing
the huge arms for India as reported by Hindustan Times.
In Malegaon a more questionable role was played by
Mufti Ismail who went to the midnight police conference and expressed his
regret how the Muslims youths had brought shame to the community by their
involvement in the arms haul. He was not a political leader then but in the
next two assembly election he won consecutively. Many who oppose him
politically like the editor of the local weekly Awami Awaz who recalled the mid
night police conference: ‘There reached the liar, promise breaker, deceiver,
who after more than seven years is expressing his regret at the arrest of the
innocent in the arms haul case. He has now demanded that the innocent arrested
should be given bail on deposit of money as security while the lawyers are
preparing argument to show that they are innocent and should be acquitted. ” (5)
Arms and RDX shown at midnight press conference in
Malegaon
ASP Raj Verdhan Sinha at the conference
Mufti Ismail at the same conference to witness the
haul
It is a quandary that the mufti was so close to
Sinha. When Sinha was transferred he wept at the departure so maudlin he was!
He would reportedly carry the children of the cop to drop them at their school!
He was also allegedly caught in the case of an unlicensed gun seized from his
person at Deolali camp where Purohit stayed. As far as arms and RDX are
concerned Purohit was definitely involved but in a letter to his superiors the intelligence officer at
Jabalpur, Maj Bhagirath Dey, and the commanding officer of Southern Command
liaison unit, Col Vinay Panchpore Purohit has blamed
Indresh Kumar to be behind the July 2008 Ahmadabad and Surat blasts. He wrote
in the letter that Indresh Kumar is “instrumental in carrying out these
actions.” (6))
-------
(1) Indian suspected of 26/11 role once worked for
India. Hindustan Times 8th
February 2010 Mumbai edition.
(2) Abrar Ahmad’s affidavit submitted to MCOCA court
on April 18, 2009.
(3)Arrested Lieutenant Colonel revealed name of high-profile leader, TOI
November 12, 2008
(4)CBI to quiz Aseemanand for Malegaon. Toi. 15-3-11
(5) Awaami Aawaz, Friday September 13, 2013
The army
named Lt Col B.P. Dhar, Captain Sood, Major D.P. Sudhir and Subedar Pawar in
connection with Purohit but refused to name the others believed to more than a
score. See link from Outlook magazine:
Terrorist? Not Our Man
His colleagues vouch for Lt Col
Purohit in an army court. Yet questions remain.
Purohit
likewise claims to have forwarded Dey a handwritten letter on Oct 15, ’08.
Chapter 12
Of Javed Mozawala
Several scores of Muslim youths have languished in
jail for years together and in the end they came out of prison as innocent
accused in terror related charges. Some of them have even been killed through
beating and water boarding or hanging like Khwaja Yunus and Shakeel Ahmad.
There is strong probability that another accused sentenced on July 15, 2013 to
seven years imprisonment is innocent, Javed Mozawala. The circumstances of the
case show what even the session court admitted as “lapses” in the
investigation.(1) For example the witness account
looks as fabricated as in some other cases. According to the prosecution
witness Fakir Ahmad Mansoor Ali, Javed had given envelops to him to be handed
over to the Pakistani High Commission in Delhi. “These envelopes contained CDs,
pen drives and hard discs on which information regarding defense installations
and other infrastructure was stored.” There is no other official record of this
with the Crime Branch of any previous or later such handing over of
information. Why should Javed trust another person to carry sensitive matters
concerning to of all countries, Pakistan?
It is also worth noting that the court acquitted
Mozawala under Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
The Pak High Commission employee Jamal and Abdu Latif Bhatti must have been
contacted by any one in India for any official work. Why pick up only Javed?
Even with the reservation in the court judgment it is a puzzled that the
documents were in the hands of a person other than the accused. What if the
other person was a police informer or a rival of the accused in the business of
getting visa in favourable conditions? There could have also been trade
jealousy. The reports in papers show that Javed could get visa earlier than
others in the same trade. That does not prove his guilt other than buttressing
the case of the prosecution.
The judge also erred in calling the High Commission
as Embassy: "Mozawala was in contact with the Pakistan Embassy (sic) and
was getting visa-related work done from Jamal, who was found working under a
fictitious name. He was in touch with Abdul on a cellphone number that was used
only to contact him." What exactly was the nature and content of the talk
on phone? Why did not the police furnish the conversation of Javed and the
officials of Pak High Commission?
There are many technical details which cannot be
simply brushed under the carpet of national security because Javed Mozawala is
a legitimate Indian citizen himself and has right to equality before law and
protection. (A) If the phone numbers of the two Bhatti employees of the Pak HC
were deactivated after their transfer to elsewhere Javed cannot be held
responsible as his own phone was easily accessible for the police in Mumbai. (2)
(B) The police and especially ATS are notorious for arresting people much
earlier than the date of their record in appearance in court. For example
Muzammil Akhtar was arrested on May 7, 2003 but presented in court on May 14.
This is also the case of Lt Col Prasad Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh. This
structural mistake in their conduct of investigation cannot be held against any
of the accused. So Javed was arrested on December 7, 2010 and the police claim
that they arrested him on December 9th. Even if his family says in court that he did
not sleep at home on 7th and 8th of December, will the
court entertain it? Another hypothetical situation would be how could he prove
that he was for example on work on those two days when he was actually under
detention? The court should not have enmeshed itself in such a frivolous issue.
The judge wrote in the 69 page judgment that Javed could have through “oral or
documentary evidence” shown to be arrested on 7th. When Javed has
contested that he was arrested on 7th that was enough for the
court’s purpose. It is the police who have mentioned 9th December in
their FIR. Why did not the court ask the police to account for the discrepancy?
(3)
If as the judge observed: "The documents, which are seized during the
raid, are proved to be classified and dangerous to the nation's sovereignty, if
placed in the hands of an enemy nation.” Which document he refers to, the ones
got from Farkir Ahmad Mansoor Ali or a raid on the residence of Javed? It is
known that the police have often planed incriminating documents which could not
stand in the court of trial. If raid, then who were the panchas or witness from
the neighbourhood that were present during the raid? And among the documents there
was a booklet on how to escape on being spotted or suspected. Such a collection
of tips in such a situation will easily land a person into the net of the
agencies rather than avoid being suspected. The inventory of items would rather
make one laugh rather than believe in them: “The crime branch had seized 42 pages with telephone and code
numbers, eight pages of instructions on how to conduct secret operations and
how Islamic groups exchange messages, 21 coloured photographs of defence
establishments, bridges, dams and topographies of surrounding areas, 13 visa
application forms for the Pakistan high commission, and 15 Indian passports.”
Javed like Mohammad Shafi Afghani (sentenced 5 years
in jail) had 21 photos of vital installations. If Javed had really such photos
taken by him and not planted and yet the court absolves him of conspiracy then
there more questions raised than any answered. If there existed no conspiracy
then the above mentioned items seized would be rather got-up evidence and cannot
be true. Fortunately no attacks so far have taken place and yet the courts are
seized with panic. The agencies are going overboard with such matters.
His family and defense lawyers have claimed that
what was presented as evidence was easily available on the net.(4)
Why would either the Pakistanis supply such matters or he provide them or keep
with him?
A much more convincing proof is the truthful emotion
in the court scene. It was a cataclysmic shock that shook Javed as it did later
Himayat Baig in the Pune German Bakery case. Both wept and cried and were shaken
and were overwhelmed by the calamity that had visited them. Javed fell to his
knees with folded hands while his brother tried to comfort him and his mother
tried to reason with the judge. The court was packed to the full capacity and
the milieu was hushed up as if spell bound.
His agonized cries in the court rising in a
crescendo and his realization of his wife and children’s condition drove him to
despair though it was only seven years of rigorous imprisonment. (5)
His emotions match Himayat Baig who also wept
profusely when the judge sentenced him to death on April 18, 2013. There is
another similarity of the two cases. They show the failure of the systems when
it comes to Muslims as Ashish Khetan and PT Tufail recount the miscarriage of
justice in the case of Himayat Baig: “This is in fact the story of how the
whole system—the police, the political executive and the criminal courts–is
dehumanizing, criminalizing and crippling an entire generation of Muslim youth.
This is a story that shakes your faith in the idea of India: the idea that
minorities have equal rights and status as the majority; that poor Muslims too,
if they aspire, can dig themselves out of the abyss of backwardness; that
everyone is guaranteed the constitutional right to a fair trial; that the
criminal courts are neutral dispensers.”(6) In fact Javed and Baig
have fallen victim of the carefully crafted policy of keeping them within the
“abyss of backwardness”.
-------
(2)
Chapter 13
Deconstructing the confession of Mansoor Peerbhoy
The deputy commissioner of police Zone IX Niket
Kaushik took down the confession of Mansoor Peerbhoy on 15 and 17 October2008
and got it signed by the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate SN Chindhamberkar. One
of the questions put to him was “Why are you making a confession?” Mansoor
replied: “I wish to tell the truth.” The next question and its reply give away
the real truth. “Do you want anybody to be present when you give your
confessional statement?” Truly speaking an uninhibited and casual reply would
be based on our dictum which says: Let truth prevail. In real terms the victim
would like others to be present and see that what he replies is made public or allow
the public to know it. But strangely Mansoor replied “No.” His negative reply
indicates that he was constrained to say so or what is worse the confession was a foregone affair
and he had only to sign wherever the interrogator told him to.
In contrast to this the threatening and taunting
email sent before and after the blasts in Ahmadabad, Delhi and other places
bears the hall mark of the letter and phone call that the Hindutva terrorists
made and sent the next day of the blasts on 8 September 2008 in Malegaon. The
caller in Malegaon contextualizes the attack that it was made by the Sangh
Parivar and more explosions are on the way if the Muslims do not leave India
and the Jamiatul Ulema does not stop being smart.
The email sent to media on impending blasts in Delhi
reads: ““Blasts in green zone in Delhi—stop them if you can.” (At that time, as
Mohammad @Iqbal Bhatkal was in Mangalore, ASif@Haroon went to Mangalore, got
the dictation for mail from iqbal there and we prepared the final draft in
Pune.” Mansoor wanted the first part dealing with threat to be kept but denied
the clause in the parenthesis. This could not be the brain child of Mansoor.
Somebody must have prepared the confession beforehand and decided to remove the
parenthetical clause. Reading between the lines anyone can say that the
rejected clause would have increased the burden of the investigative agencies
to support it by verification and arguing in the court of law. Hence, the
inference, that the denial was ipso facto.
Furthermore being a well paid person through the
company pay packet and also reimbursement of 70,000 for the course of learning
hacking, it is unthinkable that they (here specifically Mansoor) would buy a
lap top for Mubeen at the instance of Iqbal Bhatkal. It is improbable. That the
Google paid him the expenses of the course in Hyderabad is an established
truth. Therefore Iqbal Bhatkal has no locus standi.
Hemant Karkare was the chief of Anti Terrorism Squad
during this period. He was perplexed by the excellent family and cultural
background of Mansoor. He could not believe that such a prodigious boy would so
demean himself to terror activities. Thus the charge sheet saying that he and
the alleged accomplices had the intention of "waging war against India, to shake the faith of common
citizens by large scale violence" is improbable to say the least. Nothing
has shaken the faith of the commonalty as far as blasts are concerned. If
anyone is worked up over it, it is only the Hindutva groups. To reflect focus
from them these inflated charges could be made. As a former ATS officer said of
the lap top of Dyand Panedy recording: “Listen to the tapes
and you’ll understand why these men should be charged with sedition and waging
war against the state.” Comparing the confession of Mansoor with the above
quoted remark shows that if at all there was conspiracy it was not on the part
of Mansoor.
(Hindutva terror’s deep roots exposedMail Today 18 July 2010)
The Peerbhoy family is not like the families of
criminals be they terrorists or not. They are intelligence and articulated.
Even Mansoor’s brother Alim has this much IQ to say the probable: "Mansoor
can't be a terrorist. He works for about 15 hours a day. Where would he get
time for terrorist activities? Even if he did send these e-mails, he must have
been made to do so by other people without him having any knowledge of such
terrorist intentions."
So the crux of the problem is how to go to the
logical end of proving what Karkare wanted but was cut down in his track to
unearth the full extent of “politics of terrorism” as he referred in his last
interview to Indian Express called
Smily farewell. Earlier he had remarked “What does one make of these men? Look
at their backgrounds. Their academic excellence can put one to shame.” Karkare
could not himself be ashamed of such stuff of what men of integrity and honesty
and intelligence are made of, specifically Mansoor and Subhan he meant. It was
for those who wrongfully arrest the innocent Muslims and framed them in bogus
terror charges.
December 19, 2013
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