Delhi police fumble 'Iran' bomb
probe By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The Delhi Police Special
Cell, which has accused an Indian journalist and
four Iranians of conspiring to bomb an Israeli
embassy car in Delhi on February 13, has a long
history of planting evidence on those it has
accused and of obtaining false confessions,
according to court records now cited by critics of
the police unit.
The Special Cell (SC) was
organised in 1986 to investigate terrorism and
major crimes, but it has been given such wide
latitude in its operations that it has violated
legal norms with complete impunity, critics say.
The unit's efforts to frame those it
accuses have been so obvious - often employing the
same tactics over and over again - that a
significant majority of
its cases have been rejected by judges in recent
years.
Of the 174 individuals against whom
the SC has brought charges from 2006 through 2011,
119 of them - nearly 70% - have been acquitted,
according to official figures obtained under
India's Right to Information Act by activist Gopal
Prasad.
The SC response to that
development has been to leak false confessions and
evidence to the news media in a largely
unsuccessful effort to sway judges.
Confessions falsified by the SC are
"routinely leaked to the press to establish the
guilt of the accused", Manisha Sethi, an assistant
professor at Jamia Milia University in Delhi and
an activist with the civil rights organisation
Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, told IPS.
She described the result as "a vicious trial by
media that indicts the accused well before the
trial even begins".
In the recent embassy
car bombing, the first wave of leaks to the press
about the alleged confessions of Indian journalist
Syed Mohommed Ahmad Kazmi were timed to generate a
wave of sensational articles in March portraying
Kazmi as admitting to having been a participant in
the embassy car bomb plot just before his bail
application, as Sethi pointed out in an e-mail to
IPS.
That maneuver prompted the court that
was hearing Kazmi's bail application to admonish
the public prosecutor to refrain from such leaks.
A report, soon to be published by the
Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association and a copy
of which has been obtained by IPS, of 16 terrorism
cases brought by the SC from 1992 to 2008
documents a consistent pattern of irregularities
in police procedures that led the courts to
conclude that the police had framed those who had
been accused.
The report's detailed
accounts of the cases are based entirely on
conclusions reached by the judges in rejecting the
central claims of the SC.
Among the most
prominent irregularities documented in the report
are those relating to incriminating evidence said
to have been seized from suspects and to alleged
confessions.
Typical of the SC terrorism
cases described in the report is the case of
Salman Kurshid Kori. The SC claimed that it
arrested Kori and two other Muslim men as
operatives of the militant Islamic group
Lashkar-e-Toiba in December 2006. The SC reported
seizing explosives, detonators and hand grenades
from bags carried by each of the three men.
But the judge for the case heard evidence
that the accused had been detained much earlier
than the dates cited by police.
He also
pointed out that there were no public witnesses to
the seizure of the weapons, contrary to normal
police procedures, despite the fact that a crowd
had gathered to witness the arrest.
Even
more telling, the "seizure memo", which should
have been written at the site of the seizure well
before the "First Information Report" (FIR) was
filed in the case, was found to have been written
in the same handwriting and ink as the FIR.
Those obvious signs of police deception
convinced the judge that the SC had framed the
three men.
The SC officer who supervised
the interrogation and arrest of the three men was
then-assistant commissioner of Police Sanjeev
Yadav, now an Additional Deputy Commissioner of
Police and in charge of the embassy car bomb case.
The Kori case is not the only one over
which Yadav presided to have been rejected by a
judge because of indications that innocent people
were framed. The report documents a total of four
such cases all from 2006 and 2007 in which the
seizure memo was signed at the same time and by
the same person as the FIR. Also, no public
witnesses attested to the seizures, and the
suspects were found to have been detained much
earlier than claimed.
Yadav is also under
investigation by the Indian government for the
deaths of five people who were said to have been
killed in a violent "encounter" in May 2006 in
Delhi's Sonia Vihar district between an SC team
and what was believed to be a criminal gang.
Relatives of two of the dead alleged in a petition
to the National Human Rights Commission that the
victims had been taken from their residences by
police and then killed in Delhi.
After
examining forensic evidence surrounding the
supposed encounter, the NHRC concluded in a
mid-2010 report that no "cross firing" had
occurred - and thus that the police account had
been falsified. That report led to the launch of
an investigation by a magistrate into the incident
last September.
In a separate
investigative report published last February on SC
abuses in terrorism cases, Sethi described a
common pattern in one case after another: alleged
secret information from an informant about the
arrival of a terrorist in Delhi, followed by
dispatch of a police party to the point of
arrival; unsuccessful efforts to get civilians to
be public witnesses; the apprehension of the
"terrorist"; and subsequent recovery of arms or
explosives, which were displayed to the press.
Only when each of the cases went to trial
was the SC narrative found to have been bogus,
according to Sethi's investigation, which was also
based on court documents.
In the 2005 case
of Moinuddin Dar and Bashir Amad Shah described by
Sethi, the SC claimed that the two men were
Kashmiri terrorists who had come to Delhi from
Kashmir carrying 450,000 rupees (US$8,000) in a
car loaded with arms and ammunition, after the SC
had been informed by a confidential source when
and where they were arriving. Upon arrest, the two
men had allegedly confessed to their terrorist
plan.
But Sethi recounted that the case
soon fell apart in court when the judge found that
the car full of arms and ammunition had been
"planted" and "used as a tool to falsely implicate
the accused persons in this case". He found that
the police vehicle that was supposed to have taken
the police team to the site of the arrest had
actually not moved that day, and that the two men
had been held illegally by police in a hotel room
for two weeks.
After investigating another
2006 SC terrorism case, India's Central Bureau of
Investigation called for three SC officers to be
charged with lying under oath and creating false
evidence. But despite several instances in which
courts directed the Delhi Police Commissioner to
initiate legal action against officers of the SC
for various abuses, none have yet been punished.
(This story is the last in a three-part
series, "The Delhi Car Bombing: How the Police
Built a False Case", in which award-winning
investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissects
the Delhi police accusation against an Indian
journalist and four Iranians of involvement in the
February 13 bombing of an Israeli embassy car. For
Part 1, see here;
for Part 2, see here.
Gareth Porter, an investigative
historian and journalist specializing in US
national security policy, received the UK-based
Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for
articles on the US war in Afghanistan.
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