Those who read this, especially after last week's latest assault on the city, may feel angry. Anger is important, but misdirected anger is counterproductive. It is true that men who have been charged with serious acts of terror are out of prison, leading normal lives. Does this mean there is no justice? These men would argue that this is justice - they are free or on bail not by accident but by legal decree. They would even argue that injustice has been done upon them - one of them has spent about 8 years in prison, roughly twice the minimum penalty under POTA, the anti terror law under which they were charged. But the victims of the blasts for which these men have been charged also feel robbed of justice - who is it, then, that killed their fathers, sons, daughters, wives?
Mostly, these questions are co-opted by the usual media flotilla of politicians, city notables and prime time pundits who convert them into expressions of glib outrage and 'demands for justice', which of course are forgotten by the end of the news cycle. Any genuine attempt to seek answers will require a dogged engagement with the slow, grinding progress - or as we shall see, paralysis - of Mumbai's blast cases. It means staying with the story long after the candlelit vigils have ended, suspects arrested, terror masterminds are named, chargesheets filed. At the very least, this may help locate the calls for 'justice' in a less vacuous and more informed commentary. At the very best, sustained, informed public attention might spur our law enforcement machinery to be more rigorous with their claims to the public and to the courts in the future. It might even spur our courts towards a greater swiftness in the prosecution of justice in terror attacks - both of long pending cases , as well of new ones.
As it stands, this is the depressing algebra of Mumbai's terror blast cases: seven blasts (or blast cases) in the span of four years, from late 2002-2006 - Ghatkopar, Bombay Central, Vile Parle, Mulund, a second Ghatkopar blast, the twin Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar blasts, and the serial train blasts. Two hundred eighty people killed, and perhaps thrice that number wounded. Of the seven cases, one has outright collapsed, three others are on the verge of collapse, with most of the accused out on bail and the trial not even begun. In the fifth, the trial has only just started , three years after the incident. There have been only two convictions.
Lets first tackle the unravelling of the wave of bombings that hit the city in the immediate aftermath of the Gujarat riots, from December 2002 to August 2003 - six blasts in the course of nine months. These six blasts are linked by the Gujarat revenge theory, and by the police's forceful contention that they were the handiwork of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) modules that had become active in Western India, in tandem with the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The first theory is given weight by the timing - the blasts took place eight months after the Gujarat riots, and the targets selected -mostly residential Gujarati areas like Ghatkopar, Mulund and Vile Parle, or commercial hubs like Zaveri Bazaar. In enforcing the second theory, of LeT-SIMI links, the police brought in some of Mumbai's encounter 'specialists'. This was their high noon. By the late nineties, they had cleaned up the underworld, and needed a new enemy. Many of them were assigned to the blast cases, where they deployed some of the methods they had used in their fight against the gangs in the fight against terror - a widespread network of informants, high profile encounters, custodial excesses, and connecting the same groups of accused to multiple cases. But the methods that may have been successful in containing the underworld faltered when combating the more complex menace of urban terrrorism.
Within a month of the first of the blasts, in a bus in the Mumbai suburb of Ghatkopar in December 2002, the police were given intelligence on a phone intercept between two men discussing the blast in a 'suspicious manner' - Dr Mateen, a doctor from Aurangabad interning in Mumbai and one Muzammil. They arrested them as the main accused. Later, they arrested Imran Rehman Khan, a PCO operator from Mumbai, who they said was the mastermind. Imran was picked up from Dubai; according to the police, they said that Imran had planned the entire operation and left for Dubai 3 months before the blast. Totally, nine men were arrested. By April 2003, the police filed a 1,100 page chargesheet, which cited statements of 191 witnesses, including witnesses that identified the bomb planters, as well as confessions of two of the accused who claimed they saw Dr Mateen making the bomb in the hostel room of the Mumbai's city-run JJ Hospital. All of them were charged with links to groups, not just LeT and SIMI, but even Jaish-e-Mohammed and Al Qaeda.
But then - improbably - the police added to the Ghatkopar case a group of 13 men they had arrested from Padgah for the Mulund blast, including Saqib Nachan. That blast had taken place in March 2003, in a crowded ladies compartment as the train pulled into the station of suburban Mulund. The police said they had grounds to suspect Nachan and his group's role in the Ghatkopar case. But it was widely seen as a blatant attempt to foist more cases on Nachan, and cast him as the real 'mastermind' for a series of blasts. The linkage was so weak that the then public prosecutor Rohini Salian, in a rare and highly embarrassing admission had to stand up before the judge and say that there was no evidence that the Padgah group had anything to do with the Ghatkopar blast. All 13 were let off in that case.
Further evidence of police chicanery surfaced - the confessional statements of three separate accused noted down by three separate DCPs was identical down to the last word, as if photocopied thrice over. As did more disturbing facts - the possible custodial murder of one of the accused, Khwaja Yunus, a software engineer from Dubai. The Ghatkopar chargesheet claimed that the vehicle in which the police were taking Yunus to verify one of the locations outside Mumbai met with an accident and he escaped. But Dr Mateen said that he saw Yunus beaten up in the Ghatkopar crime branch lock-up. The Khwaja Yunus killing grew into a controversy that almost eclipsed the main Ghatkopar case. The state CID finally filed a chargesheet against Sachin Vaze, the police officer (and an encounter 'specialist') who was allegedly transporting Yunus, and 3 constables. Vaze was arrested in 2004 but was released on bail for lack of evidence, one more addition to the tally of high profile crimes that remain unsolved. But by then, the prosecutions case was severely dented.
The final blow came with one of the key witnesses, the bus conductor, turning hostile. By December 2004, Dr Mateen and the eight others were discharged. In exactly two years, the Ghatkopar case had collapsed.
The tremors from the collapse of the Ghatkopar carried over to the Mulund blast case as well, where instead of learning the perils of overloading multiple cases on the same accused, a stung police force lapsed into further legal heavy handedness. They accused Nachan and his group not just of the Mulund blasts but of two low intensity blasts earlier in the same year - in a McDonalds outlet in Bombay Central Station, and a bus in Vile Parle.
More heavy handedness - and the temptation for sensational 'operations' - marked the Mulund investigations right from the outset. The police claim they discovered Nachan's role after gunning down three suspected LeT militants in the Mumbai suburb of Goregaon a week after the Mulund blast. On one of them, they said they found a diary which named Saqib Nachan as the mastermind behind the blast. Unlike Dr Mateen who had no prior criminal background, Nachan had just completed ten years in prison after being convicted in a terror-related case in Gujarat under POTA. (Nachan offered a glimpse of his radical views years later when in 2007, during his trial, he offered to bury the unclaimed bodies of the 26/11 terrorists in Padgha, an offer which many in his own community found abhorrent). There were also reports of his involvement in the murder of a local politician in 2002. To the police, his past history, combined with the diary was evidence enough. They said he was running training camps awith the LeT in the hills behind Padgha. And so a massive khakhi contingent, along with some of the city's top encounter specialists like Pradeep Sharma and Sachin Vaze descended on Padgha to arrest Nachan. Nachan mobilised the villagers to come out in strength to block the arrest - claiming he would otherwise be killed in a fake encounter.
He finally surrendered before the court a few weeks later, and was arrested and chargesheeted along with 13 others, but by then his lawyers had enough material to mount a ferocious offensive on the nature and circumstances of Nachan's arrest. They asked for a CBI enquiry into the killing of the three LeT militants, arguing that one of them was already under arrest. They pointed to the improbability of a militant carrying a diary which names the mastermind of a bomb attack. They claimed an AK-47 recovered from his house was planted. Within a year into his trial, Nachan dropped his lawyer, the young and talented Mubin Solkar, and argued his own defense, filing a barrage of petitions and applications. His most effective stalling tactic proved to be moving the superior courts on ground that under POTA, the statement of one accused cannot be used against the other. By the time this technicality was heard and disposed off, almost seven years had elapsed. During this time, the case lost steam and the accused began to get bail in batches.
In January this year, eight years after he was arrested, Nachan walked out on bail. The trial in the three blast cases in which he is charged - Bombay Central, Vile Parle and Mulund - has not started.
The spectre of multiple 'mastermind's and multiple theories - and legal delays - came to haunt the Mumbai police three years later, during the train blasts of 2006. It started off as a prestige investigation for the force and for its newly revived Anti-Terror Squad (ATS). Within a week after the blasts, came the breakthrough - the interception of a number of conversations discussing the blasts between Mumtaz Chowdhury, an Arabic teacher from Navi Mumbai and his brother-in-law Kamal Ansari, a tailor from Bihar. The police arrested the two, claiming that Ansari was a 'known operative of the LeT' who brought in Pakistani terrorists into India from the Bihar-Nepal border. These arrests led them to Bandra - based Faizal Sheikh, a garment exporter described as the LeT's main recruiter for Western India. In all they made 11 arrests. The police claimed that several of the accused confessed, leading to a 10,000-page chargesheet, and vivid details of how the bombs were assembled in pressure cookers in Govandi, a sprawling Mumbai slum, how Pakistani handlers were smuggled into the city, how they set off in pairs - Indian planter and Pakistani handler - to Churchgate station, and how the bombs were planted in seven northbound commuter trains.
The first setback to what seemed like a professionally handled case by the ATS came in the form of a technicality, when the accused , who were charged with MCOCA, Maharashtra's tough anti-organised crime law (POTA had lapsed 2 years earlier) moved the superior courts on the applicability of certain conditions of MCOCA to their case. As the Supreme Court mulled over this petition, two years went by. The trial has finally restarted last year.
In the interim, several of the accused filed applications retracting their confessions, claiming they were extracted under torture.
But perhaps the greatest challenge came towards the end of 2008, when Mumbai police's crime branch began arresting members of the Indian Mujahideen for a series of blasts in major Indian cities through 2008. One of those arrested, Sadiq Sheikh confessed not only to his role in blasts in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi, the Sankatmochan temple in Benaras, Hyderabad and Gorakhpur - but also the Mumbai train blasts! Sadiq claimed that it was is his group who had planned and executed the train bombings, from the assembly in pressure cookers, to planting the explosives. According to him, no Pakistanis were involved. His confession formed part of the crime branch chargesheet - and suddenly, the train blasts had two different narratives, and two different sets of accused.
The courts eventually released Sadiq on bail for the train blasts case, citing lack of evidence, but it left the ATS red faced. They said his 'confession' was typical of the stalling tactics employed by hardened terrorists to throw investigators off track, but many detected a whiff of politics between the ATS and the Crime Branch. Whatever the truth, it brought into focus serious questions the credibility of the evidence - and of the initial claims made by the ATS in 2006 - not the best status for a case now in its final stages. Rohini Salian, the state's redoubtable public prosecutor through this difficult period, finally quit her office around the same time. She cites a multiplicity of reasons for her decision, one of them was the train blast politics between the ATS and the crime branch.
In all this time, there has been a conviction in only one case - the Zaveri Bazaar/Gateway of India twin blasts of August 2003, the last of the series of 'Gujarat revenge bombings' that began in December 2002. The three accused, including Hanif and Fahmida, a husband and wife from Mumbai were tried and sentenced to life in 2009. They had taken a taxi to their target destination, in which they left their bomb, hoping that the blast would kill the driver and eliminate a potential witness. But the taxi driver strolled away from his car after dropping them off at the Gateway of India, and survived. His description, backed by rigorous police groundwork led the police to the couple Hanif and Fahmida barely a week after the blast. Hanif, an auto driver, was apparently brainwashed by the LeT while he was in Dubai as a migrant worker into taking revenge for Gujarat. The police played this one very much by the book, limiting the number of arrests, and resisting the urge to overload the accused with other blast cases, adding to their charges only one other blast -a second Ghatkopar bus blast that took place in 2003.
Investigating and prosecuting terror cases successfully isn't easy. The evidence is largely based on confessions, which comes with attendant legal weaknesses. Terror is a transnational phenomenon, the monitoring and pursuit of which are often beyond the capacity of local police forces . There are immense pressures for swift results. There are communal sensitivities to negotiate. And unforgiveable legal delays. But equally unforgivable are hasty investigations, papered over by sensational claims of breakthroughs and masterminds, custodial abuse and low-level evidence tampering. In almost every case, the police approach to arrests was less with the precision of an angler, but more with the sweep of a mechanized fishing trawler - you cast the net wide, hoping to trap a few guilty in a shoal of bystanders.
These are generic failings, common - with varying degrees - to Indian policing everywhere. But it is all the more galling in the case of the Mumbai police, with its history of professionalism. It is worth noting that the time span of the first wave of blasts was also the time when the aura of professionalism was slowly chipping away. It reached its nadir in 2003. The year that the city was hit by the maximum number of blasts, was also the year of the Telgi stamp paper scam , perhaps the greatest internal crisis to engulf the city force. Those of us reporting the blast investigations were also reporting a ever widening spiral of charges of police corruption that claimed a number of senior Mumbai police officers, including those supervising the terror strike cases, like Sridhar Vaghal, who was Joint Commissioner of the Crime Branch during the crucial 2002-2003 period, and encounter specialist Pradeep Sawant. Both were suspended and arrested for aiding the stamp paper forger Telgi. Predictably, the case against them failed to fructify and they were reinstated.
The story of the slow decline of the Mumbai police and its impact on the handling of blast cases needs to be told in greater detail elsewhere. For now some urgent steps, which require the intervention of our go-getting Home Minister, and our somewhat tentative Chief Minister. The state's legal department needs to be galvanised into ensuring that the Mulund, Vile Parle and Bombay Central blast cases are prosecuted with levels of urgency comparable to that demonstrated in the Kasab case. A similar urgency is needed in the cases of Sadhvi Pragya, Lt Purohit and the remaining 'Hindu bombers' - another trial that is threatening to lapse into a legal twilight zone.
And finally, the case of the Indian Mujahideen (IM), accused for a series of blasts that hit major Indian cities through 2007-8. Not long after last week's Mumbai blasts, the IM's name has once again been floated from that unique hall of mirrors occupied by the police and the media. As this theory gains legs and converts into more arrests, it is worth noting that there are already 60 - odd young men in jails all over the country for the past 3 years- alleged members of the same Indian Mujahideen. For a representative snapshot of the sorry state of affairs one needs look no further than the case of the 21 Indian Mujahideen men arrested by the Mumbai police in 2008. The Gujarat police sought custody of 13 of them in connection with the Ahmedabad blasts of 2008; the Mumbai Special Court assented on condition that they would be sent only for questioning. But once they reached Gujarat, the Gujarat government passed orders saying they would only be sent back after the trial in the Ahmedabad blasts is complete. The Ahmedabad blasts trial is yet to begin, on grounds of legal technicalities. Meanwhile, the balance 8 IM men are sitting in jails in Mumbai, waiting for the Gujarat trial to end so that their co-accused can return to the the city, and their trial can begin ! How long will it take before this byzantine legal maze throws up results ? The mind boggles. And this does not even factor in custody sought of the same group by other blast-hit, justice-seeking states - Karnataka, Andhra and so on. This has the makings of a major travesty of justice - for these men, and for the families of the victims of the IM blasts. And so as a starting point, the Home Ministry could do well to club all the IM related cases in courts all over the country and move them to one specially designated, fast track court.
As journalists , we are not in the business of certifying guilt or innocence. In the case of Dr Mateen, the Ghatkopar blast accused, his innocence has been resolved by the courts. In the case of Saqib Nachan, he has been acquitted in one case and awaits trial in a case on the brink of collapse. But I know of at least three of the Indian Mujahideen men from the Mumbai group of 21 who by their own admission have accepted their guilt. I know this because unlike in the case of Saqib Nachan, I have spoken to them while they were in custody. It was an unsupervised conversation that took place 3 years ago, and they admitted their involvement in some of the blasts of 2008 with candour - whether as planners, stealing cars to transport bombs, or sending emails in the aftermath. That kind of knowledge can be a curse - in a system of justice that offers no guarantees that the guilty would be charged, and the innocent set free.
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