15 years, 3 probe agencies, and a never-ending wait for justice
HYDERABAD: Fifty-year-old Mohammed Zaffar grimaces as he rotates his left wrist, changing the gears of his green auto-rickshaw. Much like the rest of the country, Hyderabad is sweltering. But Zaffar, a father of eight, has no option but to work all day. The grimace, however, comes from a different pain – the lingering reminder of a dark day, both for Zaffar and for the city of Hyderabad.
On May 18, 2007, Zaffar was at the Mecca Masjid near the Charminar to offer namaz with about 5,000 other devotees. At 1.15pm, he was about to finish his prayers, when a massive explosion rocked the monument. Stone pieces from a white marble platform pierced through his left hand, and his ribs.
Nine people were killed, and 58 people were injured. Fifteen years after one of India’s worst terror attacks, multiple investigations, court cases, and a trail of tragedy, Zaffar still has no closure. There is not one person in jail for the bomb blast that brought him to the door of death. Zaffar only regained consciousness the day after the blast, at the Princess Esra Hospital at Moghulpura, and was later shifted to the Owaisi hospital because his injuries were serious. “The government washed its hands of the matter by paying ₹50,000 as compensation (families of the dead were given ₹1 lakh each) of which 10,000 was pocketed by a middleman. It took me more than a year for me to return to some normality, but even today, I still get searing pain in my left arm,” Zaffar said.
Within minutes of the blast, Hyderabad’s narrow lanes in the old city erupted in communal violence. Frenzied mobs went on the rampage, attacking shops, petrol pumps, and ATMS. The Hyderabad police commissioner at the time, Balwinder Singh, issued a statement that police had to resort to firing after water cannons, tear gas and lathi charges failed to bring the mobs fury under control. Five people were killed in the firing. Zaffar’s neighbour, 24-year-old Salim was a life cut short in the aftermath. “The only crime Salim committed was to leave his home at Shah Ali Banda to look at the commotion. He was shot and killed. The tragedy continues to be a nightmare for all of us. But 15 years later, while we suffer with our memories, the culprits have gone scot-free.”
The initial investigation
In the immediate aftermath of the blast, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Hyderabad police took over the probe. Initial investigations found that a powerful IED, likely triggered by a mobile phone device, was placed under the heavy marble platform near the ‘Wuzukhana’ (tank where devotees wash their hands and feet), which shattered into many pieces, primarily causing the deaths and injuries. Two more IEDS were found, one a 100m away from the blast site, and the other near the main gate. Both were defused three hours after the explosion. The Hyderabad police suspected that the attack was carried out by the Pakistan-based terror group, the Harkat-ul-jihad-e-islami (HUJI). More than 90 men were picked up for interrogation, and charge sheets were filed against 21. The mastermind, according to the police, was Shahid Bilal, who was linked to HUJI. He was killed in a shoot-out in Karachi on August 30, 2007, just months after the blast.
On January 1, 2009, though, a Nampally criminal court acquitted all the accused for want of evidence. L Ravichander, a lawyer who headed a fact-finding team appointed by the National Minority Commission after the explosion said, “Those acquitted were paid monetary compensation of ₹1 lakh each, as per the directions of NMC. The state government did not challenge the acquittal.”
Ibrahim Junaid was one of those first arrested, and then acquitted by the Nampally court. He said he was wrongly incarcerated and victimised.
“The blast ruined my life for nearly a decade. I was arrested by the police at Secunderabad railway station on my return from New Delhi, on the suspicion that I had connections with the terror group. The only crime I had committed was to help the blast victims on the fateful day, and speak to the media. I was harassed for six months in custody, before I got bail but the damage was done. My college admission was cancelled and my standing in society destroyed,” Junaid, a Unani doctor, said.
CBI, NIA, and the wait for justice
On June 9, 2007, the then YS Rajasekhar Reddy government in Telangana entrusted the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The government also appointed a commission of inquiry headed by justice (retd) V Bhaskar Rao to probe the circumstances that led to the police firing after the Mecca Masjid blast. CBI and the Andhra Pradesh CID investigations ran simultaneously, while the Rao commission submitted its report to the state government on October 16, 2010. The report was never tabled in the state assembly.
On its part, CBI filed a charge sheet on December 2, 2010, and reached an altogether different conclusion from the Andhra Pradesh CID, framing charges against Devender Gupta and Lokesh Sharma, reportedly members of the group Abhinav Bharat. In its charge sheet, CBI said that the right-wing group was behind the blast, and that the accused were “angered by terrorist attacks committed on Hindus and their temples” which they wanted to “avenge”.
NIA took over the case from CBI on April 7, 2011, and in May filed a supplementary charge sheet against the high profile right-wing leader Nabakumar Sarkar, also known as Swami Aseemanand, under various sections of IPC including murder, attempt to murder, criminal conspiracy, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 and the Explosive Substances Act 1908. NIA named him as a co-conspirator in the case.
NIA filed two more supplementary charge sheets, one on July 16, 2012, and another on August 28, 2013, naming 10 people as accused: Devender Gupta, Lokesh Sharma, Sandeep Dange, Ramachandra Kalsangra, Sunil Joshi, Aseemanand, Bharat Mohanlal Rateshwar, Rajender Chowdhary, Tejram Parmar and Amit Chouhan. Of them, only five – Gupta, Sharma, Aseemanand, Rateshwar and Chowdhary – were arrested and faced trial. Two others – Dange and Kalsangra – are still said to be absconding, while Sunil Joshi was shot dead by three unidentified gunmen on December 29, 2007, near his house in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas. The whereabouts of two others – Tejram Parmar and Amit Chouhan – are not known with the NIA court in its judgment on April 16, 2018, saying that the investigation against them was still on.
In its charge sheets, NIA said the accused hatched a conspiracy to target Muslim places of worship to avenge terror attacks against Hindus, and temples by jihadi terrorists with cross-border support, and that the attacks were planned between 2005 and 2007.
The trial itself had its fair share of controversy. On December 18, 2010, while he was being tried for the October 2007 Ajmer blast at the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti that left three dead and 17 injured, Aseemanand gave a confessional statement before the Tis Hazari court in Delhi, saying that he was involved in the Mecca Masjid attack. Aseemanand, a postgraduate in physics from West Bengal, was among the highest profile suspects in the case, and had previously worked with the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, the tribal wing of the RSS, and had spent years working with the community in Dang district of Gujarat.
In his confessional statement, Aseemanand said that he met a Muslim man named Abdul Kaleem during his imprisonment at the Chanchalguda jail in Hyderabad when he was undergoing trial. Aseemanand said that Kaleem was jailed and tortured for his involvement in the blast, and that pushed him to confess his own role.
But, on March 31, 2011, Aseemanand retracted the statement before an Ajmer court, alleging that he was under duress to confess. He alleged then that CBI and NIA put pressure on him, including threatening his family to confess to his role in a series of blasts, including the Samjhauta Express, Malegaon, Ajmer, and the Mecca Masjid explosion. Eventually, on March 23, 2017, Aseemanand was given bail.
During the course of the sevenyear trial, the NIA court in Hyderabad examined more than 220 witnesses, and went through a cache of 411 official documents. On April 16, 2018, the court acquitted all five accused for lack of evidence. On May 29, NIA declared that it would not appeal against the Hyderabad court’s judgment.
Social activist SQ Masood, who arranged legal assistance for Mohammad Osman Sharif, the father of a 17-year-old who was killed in the blasts, said that a petition was filed in the high court challenging the verdict, but it was turned away on the grounds that it was filed three months after the judgment. “Section 21 (5) of the NIA Act, 2008 states that the high court cannot entertain any appeal after a maximum period of 90 days,” he said.
Senior advocate N Harinath, who was the NIA counsel in the case, said he was not aware of any further progress four years after the judgment. “As I understand, the case has not been closed, as two of the accused are still absconding. If they are caught, there may be some developments,” Harinath said.
Reached for official comment, an NIA spokesperson said that they would “check and get back” on the status of the case.
For 64-year-old Osman Bin Mohammed, who works in a welding shop near the Charminar, also one of those injured in the blast, there is much exhaustion, and very little hope for justice. “The NIA court judgment buried our last hopes. There is no way we can take up the case further, because we simply don’t have the means,” he said.
Zaffar, still grimacing from the pain in his left hand, has more fundamental questions to ask. “Was the bomb planted by Shaitan? Was it thrown from someone in the sky? This was an act done by terrorists. Who were they? Until we have that answer, there is no justice.”