[Reader-list] Was 2002 Akshardham temple attack engineered?

[Javed]

Gujarat Police fudged probe into Akshardham.
Police letter survives to tell the tale

BY RANA AYYUB

GUJARAT’S FAMOUSLY compromised investigators presented it as an
open-and-shut case. Just 28 days after two terrorists attacked the
Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar on 24 September 2002 and were killed
by the security forces, the state Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) declared
that the perpetrators were Pakistani terrorists. This, at a time they
hadn’t made any arrests nor had any leads in the case.

Many dramatic developments unfolded after that. Among these was the
2007 TEHELKA sting operation revealing the fraudulent nature of the
police encounter in which Sameer Khan Pathan was killed,
coincidentally, in the month following the Akshardham encounter. The
Narendra Modi government tried to show that Pathan too was trained in
Pakistan. The man at the centre of this controversy was the then
Deputy Commissioner of Police, DG Vanzara, who is under arrest in the
fake encounter case of Sohrabuddin Sheikh — another man whom they
tried to project as a Pakistan-trained terrorist, but who turned out
to be just an extortionist.

In this culture of creating a fear psychosis about Pakistan-trained
terrorists, it does not seem surprising now that the Akshardham attack
too was quickly labelled as directed by an ‘enemy nation’. But TEHELKA
has now uncovered a letter written by an upright IPS officer,
Chittaranjan Singh, way back on 22 October 2002, which questioned this
glib theory. The original letter was destroyed by compliant police
officers and replaced with one that fit neatly into the conspiracy
theory. But a diligent officer working under Chittaranjan kept copies
for posterity.

The letter states: “It has been mentioned in the FIR pertaining to the
attack on Akshardham that the two dead accused had arrived from
Peshawar and Lahore. It has been found that no evidence in this regard
has been found in the probe till this date by the ATS. Then, on the
basis of what evidence was this fact written in the complaint on
behalf of the state?”

This is what Ahmedabad’s then acting Commissioner of Police,
Chittaranjan, wrote to then Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) PP
Pande and Director General of Police K Chakravarti. The rest of the
letter is a reaction to an FIR lodged on the morning of the Pathan
encounter — only the first paragraph is relevant to the Akshardham
case. The FIR says, “Pathan was planning to kill Narendra Modi and
other BJP leaders and was sent to India after having been trained in
Pakistan to unleash terror. This, after two terrorists trained from
Peshawar, Pakistan, had attacked the Akshardham temple.” The temple is
located next to the official residence of Modi.

The original letter was destroyed by police officers and replaced with
one that fit into the conspiracy theory

The points raised by Chittaranjan, which could be damning for the
government, concern not only the manner in which Pathan was killed but
the holes in the ‘evidence’ to corroborate the theory that the
terrorists had come from Pakistan.

It may be recalled that during the Akshardham carnage, in which 33
people were killed and 58 injured, there was nothing on record to
prove the nationalities, identity and names of the attackers.

Testimonies of the five co-conspirators in the case, all of them
arrested around the first anniversary of the attack, were put on
record. Recorded under POTA, and though contradictory, the confessions
of the five, who were arrested on the basis of a statement of a star
witness, Ashfaq Bhavnagri, was used to establish that the two
terrorists had come from across the border. Three of the five were
awarded death sentences, while two imprisoned for life.

The names of the dead terrorists in the judgement were Murtuza alias
Abdulla alias Doctor 2 and Ashraf Ali alias Doctor 3. However, as
defence lawyer Khalid Shaikh points out, the confessions of two of the
five co-conspirators, Abdul Qayyum and Chand Khan, did not match each
other when it came to naming the slain terrorists. “In two different
confessions, the names of the slain men are contradictory. The
terrorists also carried a letter saying that they had come to attack
India. The letter remained unstained despite several rounds of bullets
being pumped into them and water jets sprayed over them,” he adds.

The lack of damage to this letter saved two of the accused
conspirators — Adam Suleiman Ajmeri and Abdul Qayyum — from death.
(The third accused, Shyam Mian alias Chand Khan, who too was awarded
the death sentence, is yet to challenge his conviction). In response
to a petition filed by lawyer KTS Tulsi, the SC stayed the death
sentence on 9 July this year and sought the government’s response to a
plea for reinvestigation by the CBI.

INTERESTINGLY, THE petition pointed to facts that would find resonance
with the inter-departmental exchange of letters in 2002 between
Chittaranjan, Vanzara, and other senior Gujarat Police officers that
questioned the arrests made by Vanzara and his team. The petition
says, “It is submitted that the investigating officer, ACP Shri
Singhal, never visited Jammu and Kashmir or Hyderabad, which as per
the prosecution was where the conspiracy was alleged to have been
hatched. It is interesting to note that Vanzara, who as per the
prosecution went to J&K, and was even otherwise a material witness,
has not been examined by the prosecution.”

The plea in the apex court was that the police had falsely implicated
the ‘conspirators’ and had not been able to establish the identity of
the slain terrorists. While it is too early to comment on the
investigation, what is unnerving is that the letter accessed by
TEHELKA has till date not been brought on record, even in the Pathan
case, in reply to whose FIR it was written. In fact, this letter
(serial number 3788/02) was replaced by another, minus the first
paragraph, after Chittaranjan was pressurised by PK Mishra, Modi’s
chief secretary, to lie low. But copies were preserved by
Chittaranjan’s junior, Satish Verma. Mishra, it is reliably learnt,
had told Chittaranjan that Vanzara and his men were working against
people who were terrorists and deshdrohis, and so, he should take back
his letter.

Will the government persist with this sham, bending probes to its will
and constructing scenarios that vilify Muslims, implying their
loyalties lie across the border? The growing evidence against this web
of deceit suggests it would be unwise to continue these attempts to
fool the people.

rana at tehelka.com
>From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 42, Dated October 23, 2010