by VIDYA SUBRAHMANIAM
Mohammad Aamir Khan and his mother at their home in New Delhi. PHOTO/Sushil Kumar Verma/Hindu
The incredible story of boy ‘terrorist’ Mohammad Aamir whose youth was destroyed because of his wrongful arrest and 14-year long incarceration.
Mohammad Aamir had just turned 18, when one February day in 1998, he was ambushed by a police van. A month later, he found himself thrown against the cold, forbidding walls of a prison cell in the capital’s Tihar jail. The charges were murder, terrorism and waging war against the nation.
Aamir, released in January this year after 14 years, was named the main accused in 20 low-intensity bomb blasts executed over 10 months — between December 1996 and October 1997 — in Delhi, Rohtak, Sonepat and Ghaziabad. The blasts led to five deaths in all. Five explosions were on moving buses, 10 occurred in the month of October 1997, five of these during a single evening in places as wide apart as Sadar Bazar in Delhi and Ghaziabad, many miles away. The Ghaziabad blasts were reported from three different coaches of the Frontier Mail.
Aamir and his co-accused Shakeel were charged with physically planting the bombs. Curiously, Shakeel, Aamir’s main prop, was discharged before the start of hearing in 10 of the cases. More curiously, in 2009, he was found hanging from the ceiling of his barrack in Dasna Jail. In a further twist, then Jail Superintendent V.K. Singh was charged with Shakeel’s murder.
Aamir’s is an extraordinary story. His counsel and well-known criminal lawyer N.D. Pancholi says he has not seen a case like this in his career of 35 years: “It is incredible that a young boy of 18 has been named the mastermind and executor in 20 bomb blast cases on the thinnest of evidence. The case reinforces the demand for urgent police reforms.”
Isolation and release
As the charges piled up, Aamir , who was always Aamir to family and friends, acquired a bewildering array of aliases, becoming known in police and court records as Accused no 1, Md. Aamir Khan@ Kamran @Imran@ AbuAkasa @ Arif @Umer. Over the following 14 years, the darkness and isolation of Aamir’s solitary high-security cell became his world even as the world outside changed unrecognisably: the capital grew flyovers and got shiny new malls and the metro. His father, in financial ruin and broken from failing to free his only son, died without Aamir knowing about it. His mother, struck down by a brain haemorrhage, lost her voice and became paralytic.
When Aamir, now 32, finally walked free, he had been acquitted in 18 of the 20 terror cases — an astonishing acknowledgement of the lack of evidence against him. Indeed without a single witness in any of the cases connecting him to the blasts, the trial court — which acquitted him in 17 cases — came up with the same line on each judgment day: “there is absolutely no incriminating evidence against the accused.” The Delhi High Court which overturned one of the three cases that went into appeal said: “the prosecution has miserably failed to adduce any evidence to connect the accused appellant with the charges framed, much less prove them.”
The Hindu for more
(Thanks to Mukul Dube, his note: “This is one instance of a phenomenon that has affected many young men who happen to be Muslims. Repellent, but there seems to be no way out. It is proving almost impossible to get figures for the whole country. Even figures for Delhi alone are elusive.
“I am happy to count Mr. Pancholi, mentioned in the article, among my friends.”)