Syed Maqbool Shah, an aspiring teacher from Kashmir aged 17, was visiting his brother in New Delhi in June 1996 when police wrongly accused him of taking part in a bombing.
The car blast the month before had ripped through the bustling Lajpat Nagar area of shops and homes, killing 13 people and placed local law enforcement agencies under intense pressure to find the culprits.
Police swooped in a pre-dawn raid on Shah’s brother’s rented residence where evidence tying the teenager to the blast was said to have been found — including a spare tire from a stolen car linked to the bombings.
Photo: AFP
Shah was arrested, charged and sent to Tihar jail, the notorious high-security New Delhi prison that he would share with militants, rapists and other criminals for nearly 10 of the 14 years he was imprisoned.
For the first three months, he wept everyday, but later took refuge in religion after meeting an elderly Kashmiri detainee.
“I used to pray five times a day,” he said at his family’s home in Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar. He also kept a prison diary documenting his life behind bars.
After his arrest, the case took four years to come to trial and another 10 years to reach a verdict, which finally saw Shah acquitted of all charges.
Over the course of his imprisonment, the judge handling his case changed 26 times and with each switch came new delays.
“I was never convicted, but never released, not even on bail,” a thin and pale-looking Shah said.
“The last five years were the toughest. I was in solitary confinement and it adversely impacted my health,” he said.
Shah’s lost years point to two major failings in India’s dysfunctional criminal justice system.
Administrative delays mean suspects charged with non--bailable offences must often wait years before the evidence collected by India’s notoriously corrupt police service can be challenged in court.
Campaigners also say prejudice against Muslims, particularly during investigations into terror attacks, leads police to unfairly target members of the religion, which is a minority faith in India.
Shah’s case is far from rare.
On Nov. 16 last year, seven Muslim men were released on bail, five years after their arrest in connection with a bomb attack in Malegoan, Maharashtra. Investigators now believe a right-wing Hindu group was behind the blasts that targeted Muslim worshippers and killed more than 30.
The seven men, who have maintained their innocence throughout, are expected to be cleared.
Right groups and campaigners have long sought to highlight how false imprisonment occurs.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based rights group, released a report called The Anti-National last year, accusing the police of fabricating confessions and arbitrarily detaining Muslims.
“By relying on forced and sometimes fabricated confessions, the Indian government risks punishing the wrong suspects while perpetrators remain free,” the report said.
“For genuine progress to be made, Indian police need to put an end to the ugly assumption ... that virtually any Muslim is a threat to national security,” it concluded.
Leading Indian human rights activist Angana Chatterji also says that “on repeated occasions we have witnessed how Muslims have been targeted, discriminated against, and criminalized by the Indian police.”
Markandey Katju, a former Indian Supreme Court judge who retired in September last year, said police ineptitude is at the core of the problem.
“The point is that they [the police] cannot catch the real culprits, so whomever they think may have committed the crime they catch hold of them,” he said in an October interview with cable news network NDTV.
Arun Bhagat, a one-time head of the New Delhi police and former chief of India’s powerful Intelligence Bureau, denied that police were biased and stressed that terror investigations were complicated and difficult to undertake.
“Evidence is often very fleeting and many witnesses are unreliable, with some of them implicating their enemies to settle scores,” he told AGP. “Therefore, there are instances of miscarriages of justice, but this is part of the system and one cannot help it. In general there is no such bias against Kashmiris.”
On April 8, 2010, six men were convicted over the Lajpat Nagar bombings of 2006 and three of them later sentenced to death.
Four others, including Shah, were acquitted because of a lack of evidence.
“The judge said: ‘I am acquitting you with your honor and dignity intact,’ but he did not reprimand the police,” Shah said.
He was released from jail immediately and the next day he left for Kashmir.
“I was innocent. I knew it. Even they [the police] knew it. My only sin was that I was born in Kashmir,” Shah said.
Working in the family handicrafts business is no longer an option. It closed because the family spent all its savings on flying to and from New Delhi and on lawyers.
For Shah, coming to terms with his grief and the emotional scars caused by his confinement will be a long process.
“A knock at the door in the evening hours still gives me cold sweats,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing