Hyderabad,January 11:Most young Muslims arrested by the Hyderabad city police following the bomb blast in the historic Mecca Masjid on May 18, 2007, and acquitted by the courts later, are having difficulty in putting their lives back on track. The case is no different for those arrested for the Malegaon blasts in Mumbai.
Syed Imran Khan, an engineering student at the time of his arrest, who lost an academic year to incarceration, said he still fears that he is being followed by cops. “My parents believe that I have become paranoid. It could be true. But I think that my psyche has been greatly wounded because of torture by the policemen. One senior police officer even beat me with his shoes when I pleaded innocence,” Khan said.
Now that it has become clear that it was Swami Aseemanand and his Hindutva cohorts who carried out the bomb blast at Mecca Masjid that killed nine people and left 58 injured in May 2006, there are demands that the government apologize for the massive mishandling of the investigation.
But neither the city police nor the state government has apologized or come up with any resettlement or compensation package for those wrongly arrested and tortured. Also none of the police officers or men who were involved in the botched up investigation has been penalized. Most of them have received their promotions and enjoy good postings.
A day after the explosion at the mosque, the city police picked up about 100 Muslim youth but booked over 70 of them in four main cases numbering 54; 100; 75 and 198. Crime number 198/2007 of Gopalapuram police station alone had cases against 64 persons but showed 42 of them as absconding. The remaining 22 it tried were acquitted by a special trial court at Nampally after one and half years of their arrest. In all, 40 persons were acquitted by the court. Surprisingly, none of the accused had been booked in the Mecca Masjid blast case. The police had slapped different charges against them, mainly conspiracy against the state.
In Malegaon, the Azad Nagar police illegally subjected an accused in the 2006 blasts to brain mapping and polygraph tests, documents with TOI show. Noor-ul-Huda (27), a labourer, was first arrested on October 8, 2006 for his alleged association with the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The Maharashtra ATS booked him for the mosque blasts on October 30, 2006, claiming he had assembled and planted the bomb in the mosque.
Huda’s employer Shabbir Masiullah (36), too, was picked up by the crime branch on August 1, 2006, and arrested in Mumbai for his alleged links with SIMI, which were never proved.
————Times of India—————–