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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In Malegaon, A Long Wait by Smita Nair

In Malegaon, A Long Wait by Smita Nair

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published Published on Nov 6, 2011   modified Modified on Nov 6, 2011

Accused No 1
Noor-ul-Huda, 26

Labourer, Arrested on October 22, 2006

A month after the Malegaon blasts in September 2006, two policemen walked up to the house of Noor-ul-Huda at Jaffer Nagar on a Ramzan evening. They took Noor with them, telling his father they would send him back in 10 minutes. “Five years have passed. How long is their 10 minutes?” asks Noor’s father Shumshuz Zoha.

This wasn’t the first time Noor was taken to a police station. He was 16 when he was taken to one for the first time. A murder investigation during the Ayodhya riots threw up the name of a certain Abid Noor. The policemen picked up all boys with names ending with Abid or Noor. “Every season during Ganesh Visarjan and Diwali, he would be called and detained as a preventive step,” recalls Zoha.

Noor married five months before the blast—in fact, his father says, the ATS looks at his wedding as a “conspiracy meeting” where friends and relatives convened and discussed blasts while they ate sewaiyya.

With Noor in prison and Zoha out of work since last year after he got cataract in both his eyes, the family has fallen on hard times. “He (Noor) was the joker in the house. He would help his father at the looms and the house would fill with laughter when he was around. Today the silence is killing,” says Noor’s mother.

Accused No 2
Shabbir Ahmed, 42

Inverter manufacturer and trader

Arrested on November 2, 2006

Accused No 3
Raees Ahmed, 42

Inverter trader, arrested on October 23, 2006

Masiullah Ahmed makes his way slowly to the mosque. Despite his severe arthritic pain, he goes to the mosque five times a day. “He will do that till his son Shabbir and son-in-law Raees come home. He says it is his communication with the only man who has given him a patient ear for five years,” says Shabbir’s wife Kamar Jahah. “We have written to every possible name in the political line-up, judiciary and the police. No one is willing to listen to us,” she says.

The family of tailors worked in Saudi Arabia before they returned to Malegaon—after “the urge to return to their hometown grew stronger.” Jamil, Shabbir’s younger brother and Raees’s brother-in-law, wakes up every morning telling himself he will “strive to keep everyone financially satisfied”. At home, Kamar Jahah adds that “the only thing that keeps them abreast with Shabbir’s legal status is the newspapers. But the newspaper cost of even three rupees can be a nightmare at times.”

Shabbir and Raees had started dealing in inverters in early 2006 when it was still a new concept in Malegaon. “Power cuts are the only thing certain in Malegaon and Shabbir and Raees were among the first to see a business opportunity in this. After their arrest, many others joined the trade,” says Jamil, who owns a power loom.

Shabbir has been charged with co-coordinating with the accused and planning the blast. While he was initially picked in an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) case, and later booked in the Nashik case, the charges of the Malegaon blast were eventually slapped on him in November 2006 when the ATS told the court that his godown was used to make and store the bombs for three months.

At their home, the wait for Shabbir and Raees is far from over. “His (Shabbir’s) father keeps telling us to keep their rooms clean and buy a carpet every time he feels that their release date is near. We are tired of cleaning the rooms now,” says Kamar Jahah.

Accused No 4
Dr Salman Farsi, 39

Unani Practitioner

Arrested on November 6, 2006

“The siasat (government) and its machinery have failed us. They have failed Malegaon. The truth is that each of these nine accused is innocent. My husband is innocent,” says Dr Nafisa Ansari, 37. Ansari moved from Govandi in Mumbai to Malegaon, her hometown, after her husband’s arrest. Her clinic, its shelves stacked with Unani and homeopathy medicines and cabinets of branded cosmetics in Malegaon’s affluent Hazaar Koli, is now her new address.

Ansari says she’s convinced it was a letter her husband wrote along with another Govandi resident, Mohammad Ali, to the Mumbai Police around eight years ago that got them in trouble. “In our lanes, video tapes and CDs of blue films would be circulated. It had become a social menace. That is when he and Mohammad Ali wrote a letter to the Mumbai Police. Instead of taking action, the police started harassing them and would call them to the police station. Their name stayed in their records and since the letter episode, there has not been a single year when the Mumbai Police has not called them,” she says. Farsi is also the uncle of Noor-ul-Huda and the ATS claimed he too was linked to the conspiracy and attended Noor’s wedding in May in Malegaon where the blast conspiracy was hatched.

The idea of her husband, a bookworm who had a “collection of English books” and who enjoyed “good conversations”, being branded a terrorist baffles Ansari. “It was satisfying to see that the only things that the ATS could find after their rampage were books, and books and loads of books. But then, what did they expect to find in a doctor’s house any way?”

Accused No 5
Dr Farogh Makhdoomi, 38

Unani Practitioner

Arrested on November 6, 2006

Over the last few years, seven-year-old Aisha has been repeatedly told that her father is in “Bombay ka bada shahar” where he is busy making money for her education. Inside the house, a neatly arranged file hangs behind the wooden door, ready to be shown to anyone “willing to study the evidence”.

The rest of the house is divided into memories of Aisha’s father, Dr Farogh Makhdoomi—his summer of 1989 when he stood eighth in the state merit list for Secondary School Certificate and when he got a gold medal later in college.

On September 8, 2006, the day of the blasts, Dr Farogh attended to 16 patients in the morning, after which he asked his relative to drop his wife at her maternal home and then left for the afternoon prayers. His father Iqbal Makhdoomi, 63, a retired mathematics teacher and who is still recovering from a knee replacement operation, says he was walking towards the Bada Kabristan, his regular prayer space, when his leg started aching and he stopped at Naya Pura’s mosque and offered namaaz. “Farogh found me in the middle of the road. He escorted me home before he rushed to Farhan Hospital where he treated the blasts injured through the night,” says Iqbal. The family has painstakingly saved the medical register that shows the attendance of 45 patients on September 7, his receipts from his visit to the local wholesale medical dealers Dinesh Agency and Rajasthan Distributors, and his detailed itinerary with witness statements for the day.

“The ATS version was that he was at a godown owned by co-accused Shabbir Ahmed, planning the conspiracy and preparing the RDX bomb,” says Iqbal. Farogh was both Shabbir and Noor-ul-Huda’s family doctor. He had even attended Noor’s wedding in May 2006.

If the ATS had questioned Shabbir’s father, they would have had to record the fact that the godown had been shut for a long time and that the keys were always with his father,” argues Iqbal. “All my life, people knew my sons as ‘Masterji ke bete’, now I am ‘blastwale doctor ke walid’ (father),” he says.

Accused No 6
Mohammad Ali, 37

Salesman, Arrested on November 11, 2006

On the intervening night of November 10-11, 2006, when the police knocked at Mohammad Ali’s house in Shivaji Nagar in Govandi, Mumbai, the family knew they had hard days ahead. After questioning Ali several times, the ATS finally named him as an accused in the Malegaon blast case.

Ali, who was a salesman with a medicine company, knew another Malegaon accused Dr Salman Farsi, who too lived in Govandi. In fact, in May 2006, he had accompanied Farsi to Malegaon to attend his nephew Noor-ul-Huda’s wedding.

After his arrest, his eldest daughter had to leave school. “Ammi made didi stay home. She was scared to allow us out of the house. It was only after our relatives made Ammi understand that life must go on, that we were sent back to school,” says Ali’s 17-year-old son. The family lives on whatever little money that relatives and well-wishers give them.

Ali’s family is now hopeful that he may get bail soon. “I just wanted my husband to tell me the truth. And when he told me, I believed him. I am hoping he returns homes soon,” says Ali’s wife Saidunnisa.

Accused No 7
Asif Khan, 40

Civil Engineer, Arrested on November 13, 2006

Little Aisha carries a photograph of her father in her school bag. It’s a small passport picture of a man, who, the ATS believes, stored, supplied and distributed the RDX which was used in the 7/11 serial blasts in Mumbai and later in the 2006 Malegaon blasts. “She keeps telling me that she wants to see the picture every day as she fears she will forget his face,” says Aisha’s grandmother Husna Bhano, 66.

Asif had been a member of SIMI when he was in college in Jalgaon but later moved away, finding a new job and a new suburban neighbourhood in Mumbai’s Mira Road and then getting married. When the Malegaon blasts took place, the ATS didn’t forget his background and picked his name from the Jalgaon list of former SIMI members and matched them with those now settled on Mira Road.

“This fight is not to just release him but to restore our identity as social beings,” says younger brother Aziz Khan, 37. Asif had struggled to educate Aziz and had made him a production engineer. “Our father always wanted both of us to excel in technical fields as he was a tractor mechanic. Two years ago, we had to carry him on a stretcher when he asked to meet Asif in court,” recalls Aziz. Their father Bashir Khan died this May.

Accused No 8
Mohammed Zahid Abdul Majeed, 32

Preacher, Arrested on November 2, 2006

Zahid first gained notoriety as a SIMI member in 1996, when he burnt the Bosnian flag in Malegaon, protesting “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. It got his name in the police records for the first time.

It was not just the flag that burned that night: “It was my home,” says his father, Ansari Abdul Majeed, 57, a retired school teacher. Zahid was implicated in two other cases in 1999 and 2001 after he allegedly pasted a “communal” poster outside a mosque, showing weeping eyes against the picture of a demolished Babri Masjid.

In the years that followed, police officials detained Zahid every time a VVIP visited Malegaon. “SIMI behaved like Shiv Sena then, tearing posters which they did not agree with and generally creating a sense of fear,” says Ansari. Zahid was always in front, bringing down the shutters of small cable shops showing porn and bringing their owners to the SIMI office to teach them chapters of the Quran. “While his intentions were noble, the methods were uncertain. I warned him that all these acts of violence and preaching would only add sections against his name,” recalls Ansari. Tired of the constant police visits, Ansari finally threw Zahid out of their house in May 1999. While relatives of the other accused have tried to meet their sons in jail, Zahid’s parents and four siblings have not tried to meet him. A letter of apology sent by Zahid is “lying somewhere in the house, but we don’t burn candles reading it ever.” Zahid had later shifted his calling and become a maulana.

His early life though proved fateful for his family after the SIMI tag followed his younger brother Javed Ahmed, an electrician, who was booked in the Aurangabad arms haul case.

“This time I know he (Zahid) is not guilty as he can never be a terrorist. He can be useless and even an angry man who tears posters and burns flags, but never a terrorist. But apart from me, no one else is still willing to believe him. And it’s his misfortune that I have disowned him,” says Ansari.

Accused No 9
Abrar Ahmed, 34

Inverter Dealer, Arrested on December 16, 2006

Abrar Ahmed was not good at studies. A diagnosis later confirmed his parents’ fear: he had weak eyesight. Three operations later, his family asked Abrar to wear glasses, telling him he looked good. With heavy glasses, he was the strangest looking kid in the neighbourhood. “That is Abrar’s nature. He could be made to believe anything,” says his brother Jalil Ahmed, a one-man army behind Abrar.

He draws the analogy to explain how his younger brother, who was married into a family of police informers, was betrayed by his wife and fooled into believing they were helping the police with some information he had heard after the blast. “In connivance with officers, his wife and his brother-in-law fooled him to travel with policemen to places like Indore, Nashik and Ujjain, places where Abrar had no reason to be. Abrar later retracted his statement and informed the court, much before 2008 when the ATS found a web of conspiracy between Hindu fundamentalists from these region. Is this fact not enough to challenge their story?” says Jalil, an advocate who is representing Abrar and has been travelling between Malegaon and Mumbai for the last four years, keeping date with the court, meeting experts, and building a case against the “concocted story”. At home, Abrar’s father Ghulam Ahmed says life has changed after his son was named in the blast. Abrar, who, his father says, spent nine hours that day donating blood and ferrying the injured, suddenly was in the headlines as a planner turned approver.

“We are manufacturers and traders for machinery parts for textile and power looms. But the blast changed everything,” says Ghulam Ahmed, 84. “Big textile brands stopped taking our calls. Business soon dropped and we went into loss by 2007,” he says.

Abrar is not the first in the family to go to jail. His forefather Mohammed Maddu was sentenced to death in Yerwada in 1921 for the murder of a British officer and his great grandfather Abdul Motorwala served jail with Gandhi and Nehru in Ahmednagar during the freedom struggle. “All that dignity and pride was lost when Abrar was sent to jail; charges of terrorism hurts. Young boys would pull my kameez on my way to the mosque and run away yelling, “Abrar ke abba”. I knew all was over then,” says the former vice-president of the local Congress committee.

With inputs from Sukanya Shetty

Malegaontimeline

On September 8, 2006, blasts outside a mosque in Malegaon killed 37 and wounded hundreds as they worshipped on the holy day of Shab-e-Barat

Nine Muslim men were arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad on suspicion that they were linked to the banned Students Islamic Movement of India and had engineered the blasts

The case was transferred to the CBI and then to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2011

The nine accused have maintained their innocence and claimed they had been framed in the case even though one of them had briefly turned an approver before changing his mind. Their claims received a major boost late last year after Swami Aseemanand, an alleged Hindu extremist, reportedly confessed that radical Hindu activists were behind the 2006 blasts

Although Aseemanand retracted the confession, families of the nine men and their supporters made a fresh pitch to secure their freedom

The National Investigation Agency is said to have found that Hindu extremists who are suspected in the 2006 Malegaon bomb blasts, allegedly used two Muslim men to plant the bombs in and around a mosque in the textile town which killed 37 people. While one of the two Muslim men is among the nine in custody in the case and has turned an approver, the other is believed to be dead

Last week, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said that the NIA would not oppose the fresh bail pleas of the nine men

On November 5, all nine accused were granted bail

The Indian Express, 6 November, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-malegaon-a-long-wait/871317/


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