Charged with terror, damned by aliases

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article2866367.ece

The Hindu, 6 February 2012,

Charged with terror, damned by aliases

Vidya Subrahmaniam

The incredible story of boy 'terrorist' Mohammad Aamir whose youth was
destroyed because of his wrongful arrest and 14-year long
incarceration.
Mohammad Aamir had just turned 18, when one February day in 1998, he
was ambushed by a police van. A month later, he found himself thrown
against the cold, forbidding walls of a prison cell in the capital's
Tihar jail. The charges were murder, terrorism and waging war against
the nation.

Aamir, released in January this year after 14 years, was named the
main accused in 20 low-intensity bomb blasts executed over 10 months —
between December 1996 and October 1997 — in Delhi, Rohtak, Sonepat and
Ghaziabad. The blasts led to five deaths in all. Five explosions were
on moving buses, 10 occurred in the month of October 1997, five of
these during a single evening in places as wide apart as Sadar Bazar
in Delhi and Ghaziabad, many miles away. The Ghaziabad blasts were
reported from three different coaches of the Frontier Mail.

Aamir and his co-accused Shakeel were charged with physically planting
the bombs. Curiously, Shakeel, Aamir's main prop, was discharged
before the start of hearing in 10 of the cases. More curiously, in
2009, he was found hanging from the ceiling of his barrack in Dasna
Jail. In a further twist, then Jail Superintendent V.K. Singh was
charged with Shakeel's murder.

Aamir's is an extraordinary story. His counsel and well-known criminal
lawyer N.D. Pancholi says he has not seen a case like this in his
career of 35 years: "It is incredible that a young boy of 18 has been
named the mastermind and executor in 20 bomb blast cases on the
thinnest of evidence. The case reinforces the demand for urgent police
reforms."

Isolation and release

As the charges piled up, Aamir , who was always Aamir to family and
friends, acquired a bewildering array of aliases, becoming known in
police and court records as Accused no 1, Md. Aamir Khan@ Kamran
@Imran@ AbuAkasa @ Arif @Umer. Over the following 14 years, the
darkness and isolation of Aamir's solitary high-security cell became
his world even as the world outside changed unrecognisably: the
capital grew flyovers and got shiny new malls and the metro. His
father, in financial ruin and broken from failing to free his only
son, died without Aamir knowing about it. His mother, struck down by a
brain haemorrhage, lost her voice and became bparalytic.

When Aamir, now 32, finally walked free, he had been acquitted in 18
of the 20 terror cases — an astonishing acknowledgement of the lack of
evidence against him. Indeed without a single witness in any of the
cases connecting him to the blasts, the trial court — which acquitted
him in 17 cases — came up with the same line on each judgment day:
"there is absolutely no incriminating evidence against the accused."
The Delhi High Court which overturned one of the three cases that went
into appeal said: "the prosecution has miserably failed to adduce any
evidence to connect the accused appellant with the charges framed,
much less prove them."

The trend points strongly to acquittal in the two remaining cases. In
any event, there is the tragic irony of Aamir having already served
more than the maximum prison term of 10 years for offences made out in
each case. The first thing he did upon being released was to look up
at the night sky which he had last seen as a teenager. A month after
his return, his story, broken by Mohammad Ali in twocircles.net,
appeared in the Urdu press. And Aamir got his revenge: he dropped
copies of the papers in the homes of relatives and friends who had
imposed a social boycott on the family.

For all his joy in the small things of life, including his reunion
with a mother who, not being able to speak, expresses emotions through
her eyes, Aamir cannot forget the nightmare of his past which began on
February 20, 1998 with him being picked up and driven blindfolded to a
distant getaway. A week of intense "questioning" followed by
"confessions" and countless signed documents later, he was formally
arrested and taken into police remand. The chargesheet filed in April
1998, said Aamir had been trained in Pakistan by the dreaded Abdul
Karim 'Tunda' gang. Further that Aamir and co-accused Shakeel
collaborated to make bombs out of a factory rented by Shakil in
Pilakhua in Ghaziabad. These were the bombs used in every one of the
1996-1997 blasts.

Aamir's third-floor home, described in the chargesheet as a hideout
frequented by Pakistani and Bangladeshi terrorists, is a tiny 10 ft by
4 ft room in a bustling, crowded neighbourhood in Azad Market in Old
Delhi.

The police story is that the hideout was visited on February 27, 1998,
by two Bangladeshi terrorists. But instead of meeting Aamir there,
they chose to wait six hours for him at a railway track off Sadar
Bazar. The police party nabbed the two men and, through them, caught
up with Aamir and Shakeel.

The seizure memo, questions

According to the seizure memo, a search of Aamir revealed a Webley &
Scott revolver with several live cartridges, currency notes (in
American dollars), five diaries containing details of explosive
materials sourced from various suppliers, and a passport stamped with
a single visa entry: to Pakistan. Shakeel carried a bag which had iron
pieces, chemicals and other explosive materials.

Other wonders emerged from Aamir's briefcase: his ration card, birth
certificate, school character certificate, school identity card
besides fifth and seventh standard marksheets. In their "disclosure"
statements, Aamir and Shakeel said that they led the police party to
Shakeel's bomb-making factory in Pilakhua, from where chemicals and
explosives used in the blasts were recovered.

The police produced no witness to the arrests. And the public
witnesses allegedly present during the Pilakhua raid flatly refused to
support the prosecution during the trial. Chandra Bhan, the
prosecution's star witness, on whose evidence the entire terror case
rested, maintained through rigorous cross-questioning that he had
never seen Aamir and he was taken to the Chanakyapuri Police Station
and made to sign on blank papers. Out of hundreds of witnesses
produced by the prosecution in all the cases, only four claimed to
have ever seen Aamir and not one of them said he had planted the
explosives.

Several questions arise: How could an 18-year-old plant bombs by
himself — on moving buses and trains, many of the blasts occurring
just minutes apart? On the evening of October 1, 1997, Aamir is
alleged to have planted two bombs in adjoining areas in Sadar Bazar
and then travelled to Ghaziabad to place bombs in three compartments
of the Frontier Mail. Would a boy terrorist trained by 'Tunda' waste
his time on low-intensity blasts? And for what earthly reason would he
carry his fifth standard marksheet with him?

Of course, it is equally valid to ask why Aamir was singled out by the
police. His story, borne out by his single visa stamp, is that he
wanted to visit his sister who is married into a family in Pakistan.
When he went to the Pakistan High Commission for his visa, he was
approached by two men from the Indian intelligence — a fact he claims
he learnt later — who asked him to get some documents from Pakistan in
return for a small money reward. Tempted, he agreed but only to renege
on the deal. Aamir left for Pakistan on December 12, 1997 and returned
on February 13, 1998. A fortnight later he was arrested.
Interestingly, Aamir was charged with executing the bomb blasts
subsequent to his training in Pakistan. The last of the bomb blasts
was in October 1997 — two months before he went on his first and last
trip to Pakistan.

Aamir has his own questions: "Madamji," he asks me, "if at 18, I
became a dreaded mastermind with so many aliases, surely I would have
been but a child when I started out?" And also, "I spent 14 years in
jail for allegedly causing five deaths. What about the policemen who
shot dead so many Muslims in cold blood in Hashimpura? What about
Gujarat 2002?"