[Reader-list] Behind the Batla House shootout - Praveen Swami

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

An interesting piece by one of the most renowned expert on internal security
and terrorism, Praveen Swami. It highlights the major areas which have been
missed by those campaigning hard to convert this encounter or at least
portray it as fake one. Hope they plan a better theory or else revise their
'Wonderland' stories. Have a look at 'The Hindu' column below which came out
in today's newspaper.

Love
Aditya Raj Kaul



*Behind the Batla House shootout
* Praveen Swami *

Charges that the Jamia Nagar encounter was fake belong in the Wonderland.

*

"Sometimes," said the Queen in Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland*, "I've
believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Ever since last month's encounter in New Delhi's Jamia Nagar, critics have
been claiming that the two men killed by the police were innocent students,
not Indian Mujahideen terrorists. A number of well-meaning commentators and
politicians have expressed concern over the encounter. Few seem to have
paused to wonder if there was, in fact, anything mysterious about the
shootout. If it was indeed fake, the story would read something like this:
Hoping to redeem their anti-terrorism credentials and whip up anti-Muslim
paranoia, the Delhi police shot dead two innocent Muslims. For some reason,
though, they left a third innocent Muslim, Mohammad Saif, alive to tell the
tale. Either because of incompetence or to get rid of an inconvenient honest
officer, depending on who is telling the story — the Delhi police also
killed one of their own. They also shot another officer, but let him live.

A riveting fiction? The truth about Batla House is, in comparison, mundane.

When inspector Mohan Chand Sharma walked through the door of the flat where
he was to die, all he knew was that he was looking for a man with two
missing front teeth. Soon after the Gujarat bombings, a Bharuch resident
contacted the police to report that the vehicles used as car bombs in
Ahmedabad had been parked by his tenant. Gujarat Crime Branch Deputy
Commissioner Abhay Chudasma had little to go on, bar one small clue: the
mobile phone used by the tenant to communicate with the landlord. It turned
out that the phone went silent after the Ahmedabad bombings.

Based on the interrogation of suspects, Gujarat police investigators
determined that the cell phone was one of the five used by the perpetrators
between July 7 and 26 — the day of the serial bombings. They learned that
the perpetrators had observed rigorous communication security procedures,
calling these numbers only from public telephones. Between July 16 and July
22, the investigators learned, another of the five Gujarat phones had been
used in the Jamia Nagar area. This phone had received just five calls, all
from public phones at Jamia Nagar. Then, on July 24, the phone became active
again in Ahmedabad.

The investigators also found evidence of a second link between the Ahmedabad
bombings and the Jamia Nagar area. On July 19, the Bharuch cell phone
received a call from Mumbai, made from an eastern Uttar Pradesh number — the
sole break in the communication-security procedure. Immediately after this,
a call was made from the eastern U.P. phone to a number at Jamia Nagar,
registered to local resident Mohammad Atif Amin. The authorities mounted a
discreet watch on his phone but decided not to question him in the hope that
he would again be contacted by the perpetrators.

Mumbai police crime branch chief Rakesh Maria made the next breakthrough
last month, when his investigators held Afzal Usmani, a long-standing
lieutenant of ganglord-turned-jihadist Riyaz Bhatkal. From Usmani, the
investigators learned that top commander 'Bashir' and his assault squad left
Ahmedabad on July 26 for a safe house at Jamia Nagar. Armed with this
information, the investigators came to believe that Atif Amin either
provided Bashir shelter or the two were one and the same person. Inspector
Sharma was asked to settle the issue.
 'Vodaphone salesman'

Sub-inspector Dharmindar Kumar was given the unhappy task of trudging up the
stairs in the sweltering heat, searching for Bashir. Dressed in a tie and
shirt, just like other members of Sharma's team, Kumar pretended to be a
salesman for Vodaphone. At the door of Amin's flat, he heard noises — and
called his boss.

According to head constable Balwant Rana, who was by Sharma's side, the two
men knocked on the front door, identifying themselves as police officers.
There was no response. Then, the officers walked down an 'L' shaped corridor
which led to a second door. This door was unlocked. Sharma and Rana, as they
entered, were fired upon from the front of and to the right of the door.
When the rest of the special team, armed only with small arms, went in to
support Sharma and Rana, two terrorists ran out through the now-unguarded
front door. Saif wisely locked himself up in a toilet.

It takes little to see that Sharma's team made several tactical errors.
However, as anyone who has actually faced hostile fire will testify, combat
tends not to be orderly. In the United States or Europe, a Batla House-style
operation would have been carried out by a highly trained assault unit
equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. Given their resources
and training, Sharma and his men did as well as could be expected.

Judging by Sharma's injuries, as recorded by doctors at the Holy Family
Hospital in New Friend's Colony and later re-examined at the All-India
Institute of Medical Sciences' Trauma Centre, he was fired at from two
directions. One bullet hit him in the left shoulder and exited through the
left upper arm; the other hit the right side of the abdomen, exiting through
the hip. The investigators believe that the abdomen wound was inflicted with
Amin's weapon and the shoulder hit, by Mohammad Sajid.

Much has been made of a newspaper photograph which shows that Sharma's shirt
was not covered in blood, with some charging that it demonstrates he was
shot in the back. Forensic experts, however, note that bleeding from
firearms injuries takes place through exit wounds — not, as in bad pop
films, at the point of entry. In the photograph, signs of a bullet having
ripped through Sharma's shirt are evident on his visible shoulder; so, too,
is evidence of the profuse bleeding from the back.

In some sense, the allegations levelled over the encounter tell us more
about the critics than the event itself. In part, the allegations have been
driven by poor reporting and confusion — the product, more often than not,
by journalists who have not followed the Indian Mujahideen story. More
important, though, the controversy was driven by the Muslim religious
right-wing whose myth-making, as politician Arif Mohammad Khan recently
pointed out, has passed largely unchallenged.

In a recent article, the University of Delaware's Director of Islamic
Studies, Muqtedar Khan, lashed out at the "intellectually dishonest"
representatives of Muslims who "live in denial." "They first deny that there
is such a thing as jihadi terrorism," Dr. Khan noted, "resorting to
conspiracy theories blaming every act of jihadi violence either on Israel,
the U.S. or India. Then they argue that unjust wars by these three nations
[in Palestine, Iraq and Kashmir] are the primary cause for jihadi violence;
a phenomenon whose very existence they have already denied."

It is easy to rip apart the pseudo-facts that drove the claim that the Jamia
Nagar encounter was fake — or that the Indian Mujahideen is a fiction. Much
political work, though, is needed to drain the swamps of denial and deceit
in which the lies have bred.

*Link - http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/10/stories/2008101053621100.htm
*