Description Of A Struggle

A watertight case claimed by the prosecution in the horrific July 2006 Mumbai train blasts seems anything but that, with many accused reporting torture, finds AJIT SAHI

Warzone: A fire officer in the wreck of a train Photo:AP

TIFFIN IN hand, Saeed Shaikh reached the gates of Mumbai’s central prison on Arthur Road at 10.30 a.m. on June 28 this year as he’d done every day for eighteen months. It was a special meal of mutton that Saeed was bringing his father, Sohail, who had been incarcerated in the high-security jail for two years now without bail as one of the 13 people arrested for plotting and carrying out the Mumbai train blasts of July 11, 2006 that killed 187 people. A low-income darner and a faith healer from Pune, Sohail had failed to get bail, like the other accused, even from the Bombay High Court although the only evidence against him was a confession that he had long denied having made to the police. If anything, Sohail and the others had constantly complained of torture at the hands of the jail staff but had failed to secure any relief from the courts.

That day, as he reached the jail, Saeed sensed something was wrong. Over a hundred policemen had massed at the gate. The daily mulakat, the across-the-window brief conversations allowed between visitors and the accused, had been abruptly ended. Officials at the gate refused the lunch boxes from Saeed and the others, who were allowed by a court two years ago to bring home-cooked food for their relatives who are the accused in this case. Two police wireless vans were parked at the gate. “I heard some people say that the ‘railway ones’ are being thrashed inside,” Saeed told TEHELKA in an interview during a visit to the High Court where he has filed a petition over his father’s torture. The ‘railway ones’ is colloquially used to refer to the accused of the Mumbai train blasts.

Saeed had heard that a police van had emerged from inside the prison shortly before he had reached, and sped away. At 1.30 pm, the gates suddenly opened and another van sped out. A third followed 20 minutes later. “I saw abba [father] through the grill at the back of this last vehicle,” Saeed says quietly. “He was soaked in blood.” The father, too, saw his son for a fleeting moment and shouted: “We’ve all been badly beaten.” The relatives later found out that the jail authorities had thrashed dozens of accused of three different cases, then divided them into three groups and sent them to prisons in other cities. Naturally, the anxious relatives asked to be taken to the prison authorities but were rebuffed.

A prime accused in the Mumbai train blasts case is a medical doctor, Tanveer Ahmad Ansari. As with most of the alleged SIMI activists held in criminal cases across India, he, too, has a history with the police: he was arrested on the day SIMI was first banned in September 2001. (The police had claimed that the next day when the magistrate gave bail to him and six others, they shouted slogans “hailing SIMI” and were promptly rearrested. Seven years later, both cases are still pending trial.)

Shortly after one of the vans carrying Tanveer had left, his brother, Ishtiyaq Ahmed, saw that police van at a crossing while returning on his motorcycle from Mumbai’s satellite town of Bhiwandi. As he desperately tried to talk to his brother through the van’s narrow windows, Tanveer told him: “We have been beaten badly. My hand is broken.” Another accused, Kamal Ansari, had a bandage around his right hand. A third accused, Majid, had his head plastered. On July 12, Ishtiyaq traveled to the Nagpur prison to meet his brother. He found that Tanveer’s left hand was fractured, his right shoulder was badly hurt, and he had sores all over his body. In the two weeks since the attacks, no medical examination had been conducted on any of the accused.

ON JULY 7, 2008, Sohail Shaikh’s son, Saeed, filed a petition at the High Court alleging that his father and around 39 other prisoners (including those accused in other cases such as the bombing at Malegaon city and of an alleged arms haul in Aurangabad) were “assaulted brutally for almost two hours with batons, lathis, belts and stones”. He alleged that about 75 jail employees as well as other convicts egged on by them had attacked these accused when they refused to leave the prison unless they were shown the court orders mandating their transfer.

“(Over) the last six months there was (an) escalation of torture and humiliation of the accused by prison staff,” the petition said. The High Court asked the jail authorities to file a report on the allegations. Over a month later, the case proceeds at the usual slow pace, bogged down with more and more fact-finding.

In fact, the accused of the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts case have long alleged torture and harassment, saying the police have been pressuring them to turn “approvers” so that they can implicate the other accused. They say the anger of the police and the jail authorities has soared as none of them has broken down and turned an approver. On March 25, another accused, Ehtesham Siddiqui, was severely assaulted by the policemen who brought him to the court from the jail. The trial court asked him to speak but, says a relative, he “was too scared to do so”. Gaining courage a week later, he filed a detailed statement on the assault.

The trouble for these accused began on July 11, 2006, when seven bombs went off in the evening in 1st class compartments of seven local trains of Mumbai over a few minutes. Within hours, the government had said it suspected the hand of the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit, Lashkar-e-Tayaba. Within a day, SIMI’s name was being mentioned as connected with the blasts.

The police filed seven cases for the seven blasts. The next day, these cases were transferred to the Anti-Terrorism Squad of Mumbai Police and bunched together. Two months later, the ATS applied the draconian Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act 1999 (MCOCA), which is the state’s equivalent of the now-lapsed Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Like POTA, a key feature of MCOCA is that it allows judges to accept a confession made by an accused before a police officer as evidence in the trial against him.

Sure enough, the investigating officer, Sadashiv Patil’s investigations “revealed” that SIMI members were involved in the blasts as “major conspirator/ offender”. While 13 accused were arrested, another 15, including 10 Pakistanis, were shown as absconding. Nine of these ten Pakistanis are random names like Kasam Ali and Ammu Jaan with “full name and address not known”. Two more Pakistani nationals have been shown as “deceased”. The conspiracy goes all the way back to 1999 when, according to the ATS, the key Pakistani national, Azam Cheema alias Babaji of Bahawalpur, hatched conspiracies against India with some of the Indian Muslims who have now been arrested. Cheema allegedly supplied “money, men and explosives”.

The chargesheet in this case is as thin on evidence as thick it is in size, running as it does into a staggering 10,000 pages. For example, the ATS says that the prime accused among the arrested, Dr Tanveer Ansari, travelled in May 2004 from Mumbai by air to Teheran from where he was taken to Bahawalpur in Pakistan, and then to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, where he trained in “handling and use of arms and explosives in a Laskhar-e- Tayaba training camp”. Ansari returned in July 2004 “by the same route”. Of course, there is no evidence of this besides the assorted confessions, since denied several times over.

The most stunning allegation against Ansari is that he “procured considerable quantity of liquid chemicals viz. Acetone, Hydrogen Peroxide and Sulphuric Acid in order to cause explosion out of the combination of these chemicals. The bottles of these chemicals were stored by him in a locker of Saboo Siddiqui Hospital in Nagpada (a Mumbai locality), which have been taken charge of…” It is certainly common knowledge that such chemicals are used in a variety of “non-explosive” uses, ranging from cleaning toilets to nail polish. Besides, hospitals routinely store these chemicals for their everyday use.

Three months after the blasts, the ATS claims, one of the accused led it to a spot near railway tracks in Dahisar, a locality far north of Mumbai, where “a bag containing cooker gas gates (sic), whistles, electrical wires, plastic box with printed circuit board were recovered…” — three months after the blasts.

BEYOND THIS, there is little evidence on offer. The allegations of the ATS against each of the accused are elaborate: travels for terrorist training, hatching conspiracies, raising funds (including through hawala transactions that are anyway impossible to document), arranging the explosive materials, making the bombs, carrying the bombs to the stations and planting them in trains. The only small problem is that nearly all of it is based on the confessions of the accused.

Once again, the accused have confessed in batches together. Three accused made confessions on the same day: October 7, 2006. Four others followed the next day. Subsequently, 10 retracted their confessions. One has denied ever making it.

Accused Ehtesham Siddiqui is charged with having “supervised” the assembling of the explosive devices and planting the explosive bag in one of the trains whose blast killed 31 people. Siddiqui is accused of having joined a meeting a week prior to the blasts in Ujjain that had been called by SIMI leader Safdar Nagori (whose story is profiled on page 23). ATS says the meeting decided to fight “against VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal”. The police also provide a look into his personal life to bolster their case: “In April 2005, he was married but he could not go well with his wife owing to his extreme and orthodox thoughts and ultimately his wife left him within six months of his marriage.”

Investigating officer Sadashiv Patil admits that his breathtaking prose on the multi-layered conspiracy running across several countries since 1999 is totally premised on confessions. In his deposition before the SIMI Tribunal headed by Delhi High Court judge Geeta Mittal during July 9-12, 2008, Patel wrote: “During the course of the investigations, statements of aforesaid 10 arrested accused related to SIMI were also recorded by the investigating machinery which clearly reveals role played by them as a member of SIMI organisation in the said anti-national attack…” For example, an accused named Faizal Ataur Shaikh, “as per his own confessional statement, has gone to Pakistan…”

What is sinister is that confessions of some of the accused made to the police were recorded under MCOCA, whose provisions allow such confessions to be used as evidence against these accused although they later told the magistrate at the first available opportunity that they were tortured to sign those confessions, or that they never made any such confessions.

Even more sinister is that the identify of numerous prosecution witnesses, whose statements “equally revealed active involvement” of SIMI members, have been hidden — under orders from the trial judge (called the MCOCA court) hearing this case! The pretext is that the protection and the safety of these witnesses require hiding their identity. Such witnesses are now named only as F-129 or AD-894 or A-52 — and yet, there testimonies will be allowed to stand in the trial.

Indeed, the modus operandi of the ATS appears quite clear. The list of 13 accused arrested in the case shows two dates of arrest for each one. Therein lies a tale. The first date of arrest of Faisal Ataur Shaikh is July 27, 2006. Till September 30, 2006, the police did not show him to be at all involved with the blasts, saying that he had “led a cell” that had surveyed for the other group that was to carry out the blasts. But that day onwards, the police began to claim he was among the actual perpetrators. His second date of arrest comes then.

The most interesting part is that even the alleged confessions of many don’t say that they are members of SIMI.

Let’s return to the torture. On October 6, 2006, the prosecution told a magistrate that seven of the accused cannot be produced before him as they were “being interrogated”, even though the police had been ordered to do so. The reason, says SIMI lawyer, is that they were badly tortured and the bruises on their bodies would have revealed that to the magistrate. Accused Faisal Ataur Shaikh was not even allowed to meet his lawyer although the latter moved several applications.

SIMI counsel Jawahar Raja thus confronted Sadashiv Patil at the Tribunal hearings in July:
Raja: On November 9, seven accused retracted their confessions.
Patil: They did, but these have been recorded under MCOCA (so they are valid).
Raja: The accused have repeatedly filed complaints of torture.
Patil: Yes, they have. But they are all false.
Raja: Did you write to Investigating Officers of the 2001 SIMI ban cases to crosscheck the names of SIMI members?
Patil: It was not necessary.
And the Kafkaesque trial thus goes on. •