— court, not only identified Dar but also admitted to selling him the uniform. It turned out that the tailor was a stock witness of the police, appearing and giving evidence in many cases on behalf of the police. On closer examination of his testimony, the tailor conceded that he operated his shop from a pavement which left him at the mercy of police and MCD officials, and false testimonies were his way of paying hafta to the police,” the JTSA reports says.
“The encounter alleged to have been taken place on the intervening night of July 1-2, 2005, did not take place at all and an absolutely fake encounter has been projected. The story of the encounter was carefully scripted in the office of special staff, Delhi Police, Dhaula Kuan, by its main author sub-inspector Ravinder Tyagi with the assistance of sub-inspectors Nirakar, Charan Singh and Mahender Singh. The Tata Indica car was planted and merely used as a tool to falsely implicate the accused persons in this case,” the court had observed.
There was another interesting disclosure in the case. Major Sharma, who accompanied Tyagi to the Karol Bagh hotel from where Dar was picked up, worked with Army intelligence and had been posted in Kashmir for six years and subsequently transferred to Delhi as a Lt. Colonel. “Dar and another co-accused Abdul Majeed Bhat had worked for the surrender of several militants before the police in Kashmir. Sharma got the whiff of it and sensing the possibility of awards, urged the duo to arrange for surrender before him. Stung by the rejection of his offer, he colluded with Tyagi to implicate these men in this charade of a terror plot,” the report said.
Dar’s is not an isolated case where an innocent Muslim was framed and incarcerated for years under false charges only to be acquitted by the courts. The cases analysed by JTSA report reveal a chilling pattern of impunity with which the cell has been operating over the years to quickly ‘solve’ cases of terrorism by framing innocent Muslims. Most high-profile cases analysed by JTSA have ended in acquittals with the innocents spending not less than six years on an average in jail.
On April 29, 1992, the cell picked up Tanveer Ahmad, Shakil Ahmad, Ishtiaq Akhtar Dar, Mohammad Akhtar Dar, Mohammad Yusuf Lone, Abdul Rauf, Ghulam Mohammad, most of them from Kashmir, allegedly from Delhi for planning to carry out terror attacks in the national capital. Police claimed to have recovered photographs of prominent places, arms and explosives. The case fell apart after it was revealed that the dates mentioned by the police in its arrest memo didn’t match with the actual dates on which the accused were arrested. The court acquitted all seven in the case.
Farooq Ahmed and 16 others were arrested in May and June 1996, in connection with May 21 blast in a car in Lajpat Nagar. Four of them, Mirza Iftiqar Hussain, Latif Ahmed Waza, Syed Maqbool Shah, Abdul Gani, were later acquitted after no evidence of involvement of Hussain or Waza was found. In 2010, Farooq and Farida Dar were found guilty of making calls claiming responsibility for the blast and other offences. They were released since they had already served the maximum term for these charges. The real conspiracy was never unearthed.
On March 27, 2004, Irshad Ahmed Malik, a resident of Doda, was allegedly arrested from Rajdhani Guest House in Bhogal, Delhi on charges of collecting funds through hawala transactions. The police claimed to have recovered arms and Rs 2.75 lakh from him and an AK-56 and two magazines. The court suspected tampering with the ‘recovery’ since no independent witnesses was produced in the court and the seizures were sent for forensic tests a month later. In fact, the disclosure report first mentioned recovery of an AK-47, then an AK-rifle and finally an AK-56 which made the entire case look suspicious.
On January 22, 2004, Ayaz Ahmed Shah alias Iqbal, was arrested from Welcome Metro station and explosives and Rs 3 lakh were claimed to have been recovered from him. Shah had reportedly confessed that he belonged to Kashmiri militant outfit, Hizb-e-Islami. In this case too, no public witness was engaged and the statements made by the police were contradictory. The victim was set free.
Between March 5 to 13, 2005, Hamid Hussain, Mohammad Shariq, Iftekhar Ahsan Malik, Maulana Dilawar Khan, Masood Ahmed, Haroon Rashid, were shown arrested from Delhi and Dehradun. The Special Cell had claimed that Hamid was an LeT operative who visited Kashmir to procure arms to attack Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. RDX was shown “seized” from Hamid who had to “deliver it to three militants hiding in Uttam Nagar”. The “hideout” was raided and the three were killed in an “encounter”. Among “recoveries” was a diary with “entries” about Malik, who allegedly got three passes to the IMA parade. This was followed by the other —
