The Hindu : Loose links in prosecution's chain

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 10, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Loose links in prosecution's chain

By Anjali Mody

NEW DELHI DEC. 9. Four people who stood the trial for conspiring in the attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001, were, according to the prosecution, linked to a chain of complicity. The prosecution, in order to establish this chain of connections, has claimed that having traced one of the accused they were led sequentially to the other three. However, important links in the prosecution's chain have been challenged by the defence.

The start of the prosecution's case against the four accused — S. A. R. Geelani, Afsan Guru/Navjot Sandhu, Shaukat Hussain Guru and Mohammed Afzal — rests on the claim that they were traced from a telephone number 9811489429, alleged to be Afzal's which was shown to have received calls from a telephone said to have belonged to one of the dead terrorists, and listed as a contact number on the identity cards of the deceased. This first crucial link in the chain, the defence showed, could not be established.

The sealed sim card bearing the telephone number 9811489429, according to a police witness, shopkeeper Kamal Kishore, was sold by him to Mohammed Afzal on December 4, 2001. However, the call records for this number shows that the phone was in use through November 2001. The prosecution was unable to explain this startling discrepancy. The prosecution produced receipts of September 2001 to suggest that Afzal owned two phones and that Kamal Kishore might have been confused about which sim card was sold when. However, the receipts they produced were for the sim cards that Kamal Kishore purchased from a distributor, Sandeep Jain, and had nothing to do with the sale of a sim card to Afzal. The defence also showed that the telephonem number of the dead terrorist, Mohammed, 9810693456, from which calls were supposedly made to 9811489429 was tampered with while in possession of the police. The investigating officer, Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, in his statement to the court said that he switched off the phone, removed the sim card at the site of the attack, and sealed both the phone instrument and the sim card. The call record for the instrument found on Mohammed shows that calls were made from the phone on December 14; raising the question as to who reactivated the phone and what sim card was put inside.

The prosecution has stated that it traced S. A. R. Geelani, as his number was on the call record of 9811489429. Since it was a subscriber number, it had a verifiable address. On this basis, they arrested him on December 15 from/near/outside his house, according to three different statements by the arresting police officers. However, the police evidence in court showed that they received details of the call records only on December 17, two days after the alleged arrests.

The prosecution said that after his arrest Geelani led them to Afsan Guru/Navjot Sandhu, who was pregnant at the time. She was arrested at 10-45 a.m. and interrogated for an hour on December 15. From her they got the information that led to the subsequent arrests of Shaukat Hussain Guru and Mohammed Afzal in Srinagar.

Srinagar police recorded the time they received information regarding Mohammed Afsal and Shuakat as 5-54 a.m. and the time of their arrests as between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. on December 15, well before the Delhi Police's Special Cell said they arrested Afsan. Outside the court, the public prosecutor suggested to the press that "central intelligence agencies'' had separately provided information to Srinagar. But he could not explain why this was kept from the court.

Apart from the obvious discrepancies in this curious sequence of events, all the four accused have challenged the police version of their arrests.

S. A. R. Geelani said that he was arrested outside Khalsa College in the capital around 1 p.m. in the afternoon on December 14, taken blindfolded to a farmhouse, where he was tied up, beaten and tortured to extract a statement.

Geelani's wife, Qurut-ul-ain Aneesa, and two children were also picked up on the night of December 14 from their home by plainclothes police and taken to the same farmhouse.

Qurut-ul-ain Aneesa said that already present in the jeep in which they were taken was another woman who identified herself as Navjot. It is Afsan Guru/Navjot Sandhu's case that she was arrested from her home on December 14, and not on December 15 as the police claimed.

Police said that Shaukat Hussain and Mohammed Afzal were arrested on December 15 at a fruit mandi in Srinagar with a truck in which a laptop and Rs. 10 lakhs were found. Shuakat has said he was in New Delhi on December 14. Mohammed Afzal said that he was arrested, alone, near a bus station in Srinagar on the night of December 14.

The sequence of arrests is critical in establishing the prosecutions chain of connections in the conspiracy.

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