by GARETH PORTER
In “The Delhi Car Bombing: How the Police Built a False Case”, a three-part series beginning today, award-winning investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissects the Delhi police accusation against an Indian journalist and four Iranians of involvement in the Feb. 13 bombing of an Israeli embassy car.
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 2012 (IPS) – New Delhi police officials have released hundreds of pages of documents from their investigation into the Feb. 13 bombing of an Israeli Embassy car. The documents aimed to show that a well-known Indian Muslim journalist aided an Iranian conspiracy to plan and carry out the bombing.
But a review by IPS of the evidence filed in the case suggests that the Indian journalist accused in the case has been framed by the police, at least in part to implicate the Iranians in the terror plot.
The “charge sheet” on the embassy car bombing filed by the “Special Cell” (SC) of the Delhi police July 31 claims Indian journalist Syed Mohommed Ahmad Kazmi confessed to helping officials from Iran plan the bombing plot in return for payments totalling 5,500 U.S. dollars.
It also says that a moped used for reconnaissance by the Iranian said to have carried out the bombing was found in Kazmi’s residence and that forensic bomb-making evidence was discovered in the hotel room of that same Iranian.
But an analysis of the documentation included in the filing reveals that the evidence is highly questionable.
The SC has a long history of cases against alleged terrorists that were rejected by the court as involving framing people and planting false evidence.
Kazmi is an unlikely candidate for participation in an Iranian terrorist plot. A 50-year-old senior Indian journalist, he had his own web-based news service, a regular job as a columnist for the leading Urdu-language weekly and a retainer as Urdu newscaster for India’s state-owned television channel Doordarshan.
He did not need the 5,500 U.S. dollars police claim he received for helping the Iranians plan the bombing. Nor did he need the 2.26 million rupees (40,000 U.S. dollars) in foreign remittances that Delhi police chief B. K. Gupta asserted in a press conference in mid-March that the journalist and his wife had received in their bank accounts. Gupta declared that Kazmi and his wife had been “unable to explain” those remittances.
But Kazmi’s family has produced bank documents showing that the remittances had come from relatives in the UK and Singapore in 2009 and 2010. Furthermore, the “Enforcement Directorate” of the Indian Police assigned to investigate the remittances could find nothing incriminating in them, the Indian press has reported.
A more serious problem with the SC case is that it depends heavily on Kazmi’s alleged confession of guilt. That confession, consisting of five separate statements between Mar. 6 and 24, is inadmissible as evidence under Indian law on the assumption that police will inevitably coerce those in their custody to make confessions.
Inter press Service for more