Hyderabad, August 30: MIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Monday said that his stand on Haren Pandya murder case has been vindicated with the acquittal of all the 12 accused, particularly those from Hyderabad and Nalgonda, by the Gujarat High Court.
“We have maintained from the beginning that it was a political murder, not vengeance by the Muslims over Gujarat communal carnage as claimed and projected by their government. With the Gujarat HC finding fault with the CBI for its defective investigation and acquitting all the accused, it has been proved beyond doubt that it was vendetta unleashed by the Narendra Modi government,” he said. Haren Pandya, former home minister of Gujarat, was murdered in 2003. Of the 14 accused who were arrested and tried in the case, five __ Asghar Ali, Abdul Bari, Abdul Raoof, Shafiuddin and Syed Iftikhar __ hail from Andhra Pradesh.
The Pota sessions court in 2007 had given life sentence to Asghar Ali and six and seven years of imprisonment to Shafiuddin and Abdul Rahoof respectively. It had removed the names of the other two from the case. Owaisi, who helped the accused from Hyderabad fight the eight-year-long legal battle said: “Now there are bigger questions that have to be answered. Why did the government of Andhra Pradesh cooperate in the conspiracy hatched by Narendra Modi government to make people from Hyderabad accused in cases that had nothing to do with them? This is a serious issue which requires thinking by secular forces. The other question is about the biased investigation carried out by the CBI. The UPA government should find out why the CBI officials followed the local police line in this case,” he said. All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) joint secretary M A Raheem Queraishi said he was considering the possibility of suing Gujarat government for damages to the accused. “We will study the judgment and come with a suitable response very soon,” he said.
The MIM had appointed a local lawyer, Mohammed Shujatullah Khan, to liaison with senior advocate B M Gupta and his team in Gujarat to continue the battle in the high court. They were supported, among others by lawyer Nitya Ramachndran. Abdul Raoof, the accused who spent five-and-half years in Sabarmati Prison before coming out on bail obtained from Supreme Court, told TOI that he believed that “biased” local police officers helped Gujarat police in identifying some persons in Hyderabad. They arrested those persons, kept them in illegal detention in farm houses outside the city and handed them over to Gujarat police. “I don’t know whether the scars of accusations and trial will ever heal.”
–Agencies