Skip to main content

Now Mumbai terror accused, declared "innocent", publishes book detailing police atrocities, fabricated evidences

 
Following the footsteps of Gujarat's Mufti Abdul Qayyum Ahmed Husain Mansuri, another person being acquitted of terror charges, Abdul Wahid Shaikh of Mumbai, has published a book in Urdu, “Begunah Quaidi”, detailing his days in jail, pointing to how he would be subjected to verbal and physical abuse, threats and stripping of clothes during interrogation, though he was innocent.
Mansuri spent 11 years for being a prime conspirator in the September 2002 attack on Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar. He was acquitted by the Supreme Court. In 2015, he released his book “I am a Mufti, and I am not a Terrorist. 11 Years Behind the Bars”, which contains controversial names of well-known “encounter specialists”, who had allegedly tortured him.
Shaikh points to how second degree is used to get information, including use of belts, forcing one into hunger or solitary confinement, tying up and forcing one to stand for days, adding, using third degree involved extreme physical torture including waterboarding, electric shocks or chemicals on private parts, or forcing the prisoner’s legs into 180-degree splits.
“They also make rape threats towards the wives and sisters of the accused, or molest female relatives in front of you,” Shaikh is quoted as saying in a recent report, which adds, he “claims that one of his co-accused was forced to watch police officers molest his sister-in-law. Through these means, the police managed to get false confessional statements from everyone.”
Shaikh, who completed a master’s in English, a course in journalism and the first year of a law degree during the days in jail, including writing a 400-page book about his experiences “to serve as a guide for anyone who gets falsely implicated in a terrorist attack”, says, the report.
In 2006, Shaikh was one of the 13 men arrested by the Maharashtra police for allegedly carrying out the July 11 Mumbai train bomb blasts, which killed 188 people and injured more than 800. Shaikh was specifically accused of using his house to harbour Pakistani terrorists, who then went on to plant bombs in the city’s local trains along with 13 Indian conspirators.
Nine years later, in September 2015, 12 of the accused were convicted by a special court in Mumbai. Shaikh alone was acquitted, after the court found no merit in the accusations against him. Jamiat-ul Ulema helped him legally. The book contains chapters on wrongful arrests, fabricated evidence, police atrocities, and forced confessions, calling all of it “state terror.”
“After his release, 38-year-old Shaikh slowly began to pick up the threads of his life once again – a life with his wife, his now-teenaged son and daughter and his former job as a science teacher at an Anjuman-e-Islam school. But the trauma of the custodial torture he was put through has not yet left him”, the report by Aarefa Johari says.
Officially released as innocent prisoner from Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail, the book which is Urdu, says the report, “Contain Shaikh’s gut-wrenching accounts of the kind of torture that he and his co-accused were put through for the first three months after their arrest.”
“Shaikh was the only accused at the time who did not end up signing a confessional statement, which he claims was a deliberate 'strategy' on the part of the police’s anti-terrorism squad to prove in court that no torture had been involved in the interrogations”, the report says.
“However, in the jail cells of various prisons in Maharashtra, Shaikh continued to face intermittent bouts of mental and physical torture till 2008”, the report says, quoting him to say, “At one point they fractured my arm and left me without medication for 15 days.”

Comments

TRENDING

Patriot, Link: How Soviet imbroglio post-1968 crucially influenced alternative media platforms

Adatata Narayanan, Aruna Asaf Ali Alternative media, as we know it today in the age of information and communication technology (ICT), didn't exist in the form it does today during or around the time I joined formal journalism at Link Newsweekly as a sub-editor in January 1979. However, Link, and its sister publication Patriot, a daily—both published from Delhi—were known to have provided what could be called an alternative media platform at a time when major Delhi-based dailies were controlled by media barons.

60 crore in Mahakumbh? It's all hype with an eye on UP polls, asserts keen BJP supporter in Amit Shah's constituency

As the Mahakumbh drew to a close, during my daily walk, I met a veteran BJP supporter—a neighbor with whom we would often share dinner in a group. An amicable person, the first thing he asked me, as he was about to take the lift to his flat, was, "How many people do you think must have participated in the holy dip?" He then stopped by to talk—which we did for a full half-hour, cutting into my walk time.

Breaking news? Top Hindu builder ties up with Muslim investor for a huge minority housing society in Ahmedabad

There is a flutter in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur area, derogatorily referred to as the "border" because, on its eastern side, there is a sprawling minority area called Juhapura, where around five lakh Muslims live. The segregation is so stark that virtually no Muslim lives in Vejalpur, populated by around four lakh Hindus, and no Hindu lives in Juhapura.

Morari Bapu echoes misleading figures to support the BJP's anti-conversion agenda

A senior Gujarat activist phoned me today to inform me that the well-known storyteller on Lord Ram, Morari Bapu, has made an "unsubstantiated" and "preposterous" statement in Songadh town, located in the tribal-dominated Tapi district. He claimed that while the Gujarat government wants the Bhagavad Gita to be taught in schools, the "problem is" that 75% of government teachers "are Christians who do not let this happen" and are “involved in religious conversions.”

An untold story? Still elusive: Gujarati language studies on social history of Gujarat's caste and class evolution

This is a follow-up to my earlier blog , where I mentioned that veteran scholar Prof. Ghanshyam Shah has just completed a book for publication on a topic no academic seems to have dealt with—caste and class relations in Gujarat’s social history. He forwarded me a chapter of the book, published as an "Economic & Political Weekly" article last year, which deals with the 2015 Patidar agitation in the context of how this now-powerful caste originated in the Middle Ages and how it has evolved in the post-independence era.

Caste, class, and Patidar agitation: Veteran academic 'unearths' Gujarat’s social history

Recently, I was talking with a veteran Gujarat-based academic who is the author of several books, including "Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature", "Untouchability in Rural India", "Public Health and Urban Development: The Study of Surat Plague", and "Dalit Identity and Politics", apart from many erudite articles and papers in research and popular journals.

Justifying social divisions? 'Dogs too have caste system like we humans, it's natural'

I have never had any pets, nor am I very comfortable with them. Frankly, I don't know how to play with a pet dog. I just sit quietly whenever I visit someone and see their pet dog trying to lick my feet. While I am told not to worry, I still choose to be a little careful, avoiding touching the pet.

New York-based digital company traces Modi's meteoric rise to global Hindutva ecosystem over several decades

A recent document, released by the Polis Project Inc.—a New York-based digital magazine and hybrid research and journalism organization—even as seeking to highlight the alleged rise of authoritarianism in India, has sought to trace Prime Minister Narendra Modi's meteoric rise since 2014 to the ever-expanding global Hindutva ecosystem over the last several decades.

What's wrong with those seeking to promote Sanskrit? An ex-Hindi professor has the answer

Ajay Tiwari  I have always wondered why certain elite sections are so fascinated by Sanskrit, to the extent of even practicing speaking a language that, for all practical purposes, isn’t alive. During my Times of India stint in Gandhinagar, the Gujarat state capital, I personally witnessed an IAS bureaucrat, Bhagyesh Jha, trying to converse with a friend in Sanskrit.