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

[Javed]

Dear Aditya
I would simply like to ask you one question (since you consider
Praveen Swamy as a great journalist and renowned expert of security
and all):

The police is not allowing any one (and I mean ANYONE) to meet the
accused boys arrested from Batla House - they did not allow the
lawyer, nor the relatives of the accused until the Delhi high court
gave a judgment that they should be allowed to meet for one hour. Then
the relatives and the lawyer Prashant Bhushan could meet only once for
a few minutes. The police also did not allow any journalist or TV crew
to enter the L-18 flat until now. In such a situation, how can
somebody like Praveen Swamy (or Mihir Srivastava of India Today, who
promptly took a cover-story interview) have such a deep access to the
secrets of Special Cell? Did they find all this out by some
sting-operation? Or are they above law? Or are they the mouthpieces of
the Police? Or are they copywriting all these stories and feeding to
the state?

The 3 accused were presented to the media with their faces hidden in
Arab scarves. They were presented to the court (for extension of
remand) with muffled faces. But their faces were exhibited openly for
INDIA TODAY cover story! Wow, is this country being run by Prabhu
Chawla?

Give us a break Mr. Praveen Swami and Prabhu Chawla. Or at least show
us the "Mind of the Terror" from Orissa and Bangalore too, if you are
the upholders of unbiased journalism.

J


On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Aditya Raj Kaul
<kauladityaraj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 membersof 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
> *
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