Zahira Sheikh's moment, it seemed, had finally arrived.
Last month, Sheikh, a 20-year-old Indian Muslim, took the witness stand in the trial of 21 Hindu neighbors whom her family had accused of burning 11 Muslims and three Hindu workers alive in their family bakery.
The victims included her older sister, three women, twin 4-year-old girls, two babies and her uncle, who was hacked to death.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The killings were among the most gruesome in the anti-Muslim riots last year in Gujarat state, which killed about 1,000 people, the vast majority of whom were Muslims.
In the year since, Sheikh has emerged as the public face of the victims in this industrial city of 1.5 million in western India, an overwhelmingly Hindu nation.
Vowing not to marry until the perpetrators were punished, Sheikh tearfully told journalists and human rights investigators how jeering Hindus, enraged by the killing of 59 Hindus in another part of the state, surrounded the family business, Best Bakery, and set it ablaze.
She and her mother, brother, grandmother, and sister-in-law made it to the roof and narrowly survived.
But when her day in court finally came, Sheikh reportedly arrived with a prominent local Hindu nationalist politician. She took the witness stand, said that none of her neighbors were involved, and has since disappeared.
"She said, `These are the people who saved me,"' said Muhammad Hanif Sheikh, a Muslim lawyer who watched the proceedings in dismay. "She helped the accused."
Over the next several days, the relatives who survived with her took the stand and also exonerated the defendants. By the end of the trial, 24 of the 73 witnesses had recanted. On Friday, a judge, citing a lack of evidence and shoddy police work, acquitted the 21 defendants and set them free.
The verdict has drawn nationwide attention and prompted local Muslim leaders and human rights groups to accuse Hindu nationalists of sabotaging efforts to prosecute Hindus involved in the riots. They say Zahira Sheikh and her family were threatened, bribed or both.
In a report issued Monday in New York, Human Rights Watch said that 16 months after the riots, no defendant had been convicted. Muslims are being prosecuted under India's strict anti-terrorism laws, the group said, while Hindus are not.
The police are downgrading charges against Hindu defendants, filing false charges to cover up their own role in the violence, deleting the names of the accused and failing to pursue rape cases, Human Rights Watch said.
Hindu nationalists, who were overwhelmingly re-elected to office here early this year, have denied the charges and said the scale of the attacks on Muslims had been exaggerated. They said they had played no role in Zahira Sheikh's case.
Madhu Shrivastav, the Hindu nationalist who reportedly accompanied Zahira Sheikh to court, said he had never met her.
"I don't know who she is," said Shrivastav, a burly, bearded man who wears a pistol on his belt, gold rings and a gold watch. "I never talked to Zahira."
Local Muslims said the faith of India's 140 million Muslims in the country's commitment to equal justice is again being tested in Gujarat. The state's Hindu nationalist rulers and the police were accused of standing by as Muslims were killed during the riots. Now they are being accused of generating a climate of fear and skewing the judicial process.
Raghuvir Pandya, the state prosecutor in Zahira Sheikh's case, has been widely criticized for failing to aggressively cross-examine the witnesses who recanted. The portly, disheveled lawyer said public prosecutors cannot push witnesses too hard.
"If you put some hardness on the witnesses," he said, "they could complain to the government."
Iqbal Ahmed Ansari, a local Muslim businessman who aided Zahira Sheikh's family before she disappeared, called for the intervention of India's federal government, which is also controlled by Hindu nationalists. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee leads the largest nationalist party but is generally seen as more moderate.
Where Sheikh is and why she changed her story remain a mystery.
Hindu neighbors said they remembered Sheikh as a friendly young woman. They said her father died of a heart attack a month before the attack.
Piyush Patel, one of the police officials at the scene of the bakery fire, said Sheikh had been crying hysterically when he arrived.
Her mother, who was more composed, named nine of their Hindu neighbors as part of the mob. The police did not arrive at the scene for 12 hours after the fire.
Ansari, the businessman, said he took Sheikh, the youngest child in the family, to identify the disfigured bodies of her sister and uncle at the local hospital.
In the months after the attack, Sheikh seemed to come into her own, he said. She gave interviews to journalists and then testifying before various commissions, including India's widely respected National Human Rights Commission, and her girlish face became a symbol of the horror of the riots.
Her family also began to benefit financially, Muslim leaders said. Receiving aid from Muslim charity groups as well as payments from the state and national governments, they lived in various donated homes.
But the houses Ansari described all sounded smaller than the living quarters that were part of the spacious three-story family bakery. The charred building lies in ruins today, but it appears to have been one of the finest homes in a lower-middle-class neighborhood filled with Hindu families.
Today, looters have torn out every window, door and electrical cable and a family of pigs has bedded down on the first floor.
A half-mile from the scorched bakery, Mahender Jadhav, one of the freed defendants, sat in his house on Monday and hailed the verdict. He said Zahira Sheikh was now finally telling the truth.
"What can I say? These people came from outside," said Jadhav, 26, who owns a scooter repair shop. "I was at home. I don't know."
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