Charged with Terror, Damned by Aliases By Vidya Subrahmaniam February 07, 12 The incredible story of boy terrorist' Mohammad

Aamir whose youth was destroyed b ecause of his wrongful arrest and 14-year long incarceration Mohammad Aamir had just turned 18, when one February day in 1998, he was ambushe d by a police van. A month later, he found himself thrown against the cold, forb idding walls of a prison cell in the capital's Tihar jail. The charges were murd er, 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 an d October 1997 in Delhi, Rohtak, Sonepat and Ghaziabad. The blasts led to five d eaths 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 S adar Bazar in Delhi and Ghaziabad, many miles away. The Ghaziabad blasts were re ported 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 hear ing in 10 of the cases. More curiously, in 2009, he was found hanging from the c eiling of his barrack in Dasna Jail. In a further twist, then Jail Superintenden t 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 i s incredible that a young boy of 18 has been named the mastermind and executor i n 20 bomb blast cases on the thinnest of evidence. The case reinforces the deman d for urgent police reforms. Isolation and release As the charges piled up, Aamir , who was always Aamir to family and friends, acq uired 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-securit y cell became his world even as the world outside changed unrecognisably: the ca pital grew flyovers and got shiny new malls and the metro. His father, in financ ial ruin and broken from failing to free his only son, died without Aamir knowin g about it. His mother, struck down by a brain haemorrhage, lost her voice and b ecame paralytic. When Aamir, now 32, finally walked free, he had been acquitted in 18 of the 20 t error 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 accu sed. 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 conne ct 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 d id 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 twoc

ircles.net, appeared in the Urdu press. And Aamir got his revenge: he dropped co pies of the papers in the homes of relatives and friends who had imposed a socia l 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 bein g picked up and driven blindfolded to a distant getaway. A week of intense questi oning followed by confessions and countless signed documents later, he was formally arrested and taken into police remand. The charge sheet filed in April 1998, sa id Aamir had been trained in Pakistan by the dreaded Abdul Karim Tunda' gang. Fur ther that Aamir and co-accused Shakeel collaborated to make bombs out of a facto ry 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 charge sheet as a hideout frequented by Pakistani and Bangladeshi terrorists, is a tiny 10 ft by 4 ft room in a bustl ing, crowded neighbourhood in Azad Market in Old Delhi. The police story is that the hideout was visited on February 27, 1998, by two Ba ngladeshi 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 t wo 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 revol ver with several live cartridges, currency notes (in American dollars), five dia ries containing details of explosive materials sourced from various suppliers, a nd a passport stamped with a single visa entry: to Pakistan. Shakeel carried a b ag 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 s tandard mark sheets. In their disclosure statements, Aamir and Shakeel said that t hey led the police party to Shakeel's bomb-making factory in Pilakhua, from wher e chemicals and explosives used in the blasts were recovered. The police produced no witness to the arrests. And the public witnesses allegedl y present during the Pilakhua raid flatly refused to support the prosecution dur ing the trial. Chandra Bhan, the prosecution's star witness, on whose evidence t he 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 pros ecution 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 movi ng buses and trains, many of the blasts occurring just minutes apart? On the eve ning 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 co mpartments of the Frontier Mail. Would a boy terrorist trained by Tunda' waste hi s time on low-intensity blasts? And for what earthly reason would he carry his f ifth standard mark sheet with him? Of course, it is equally valid to ask why Aamir was singled out by the police. H is story, borne out by his single visa stamp, is that he wanted to visit his sis ter 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 intelligen ce a fact he claims he learnt later who asked him to get some documents from Pak

istan 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 Februa ry 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 a nd last trip to Pakistan. Aamir has his own questions: Madamji, he asks me, if at 18, I became a dreaded mast ermind 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 a bout the policemen who shot dead so many Muslims in cold blood in Hashimpura? Wh at about Gujarat 2002? Source: The Hindu, New Delhi URL: http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarOnTerror_1.aspx?ArticleID=6580

COMMENTSWe mindlessly parrot philosophies taken from developed cultures. e.g. '' A hundred guilty can go free, but no innocent should suffer''. Or, ''All are inn ocent unless proved guilty''. Do any of these apply in this particular case? A n umber of officers have cooked up a case and made this boy suffer. Will they be m ade to suffer the same way? What about the courts, which are so much immersed in following their own procedures that they have no time to dispense justice, whic h after all is their reason for existence? Truly shameful! By Asif Merchant - 2/16/2012 1:01:44 AM We mindlessly parrot philosophies taken from developed cultures. e.g. ''A hundre d guilty can go free, but no innocent should suffer''. Or, ''All are innocent un less proved guilty''. Do any of these apply in this particular case? A number of officers have cooked up a case and made this boy suffer. Will they be made to s uffer the same way? What about the courts, which are so much immersed in followi ng their own procedures that they have no time to dispense justice, which after all is their reason for existence? Truly shameful! By Asif Merchant - 2/16/2012 1:00:53 AM This is just an atrocity, plain and simple. And Mohammad Aamir is just one of in numerable innocent young Muslims whose lives have been shattered and whose famil ies have suffered unbearable grief because of such unjustifiable incarcerations. By Ghulam Mohiyuddin - 2/9/2012 1:00:11 AM It is an unpardonable crime against humanity. Government system has killed the youth of this person and no compensation can ever match the same. Government / Society must do something exemplary to compensate this victim. It is really un fortunate this happened in India where many criminals walk away with murder wher e an innocent is made to suffer.

By satwa gunam - 2/8/2012 10:10:08 PM