The sixth of December 1992 was one of the darkest days in the history of
modern India. On this fateful day, Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque
reportedly built by the Mughal general Mir Baqi, was demolished by
thousands of volunteers—known as kar sevaks. The kar sevaks are rightwing
Hindu fundamentalists, and they believe that an ancient temple was
razed to the ground to build the mosque. Demolition of the centuries-old
structure breached the fragile amity between the Hindu and Muslim
communities of India like few other events ever have. The circumstances
leading up to this tragic event are worth a mention.
In Hindu tradition, the city of Ayodhya, in the north Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh, is believed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama, the seventh
incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Some Hindus believe that Rama was
born at the same site where Mir Baqi built the mosque after demolishing a
temple of Rama, though historical evidence to support this contention is
scarce. For over four centuries, both Hindus and Muslims used the site for
religious purposes. Then in 1822, an official of the local court at Faizabad
made the claim that the mosque stood on the site of a temple. Ever since
then a dispute over the title of the land has festered between claimants of
Hindu and Muslim communities and has led to discord between them from
time to time.
In the 1980s the dispute came to a head when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP), a right-wing fundamentalist organization, began a campaign for the
construction of a temple dedicated to Rama at the site of the mosque. On 6
December 1992, VHP organized a rally of roughly 1,50,000 kar sevaks that
turned violent. The kar sevaks overwhelmed security forces and tore down
the mosque. The demolition resulted in several months of communal riots
between Hindus and Muslims, causing the death of at least 2000 people.
Shock waves spread not only to different parts of the country but also to
distant corners of the world, enraging the Muslim community and
tarnishing the image of India as a secular and tolerant nation. Retaliatory
violence against Hindus and their religious places was reported in Pakistan,
Bangladesh and the Middle East.
In India, the repercussions—besides communal riots and killings—were
seen in the increase in acts of terror, such as the deadly serial bombings in
Mumbai on 12 March 1993 that claimed 279 lives, caused injuries to nearly
700 people and damage to property, both public and private, worth
hundreds of crores of rupees. The divisive atmosphere in the country and
the latent wrath in the Muslim community over the demolition of the
mosque and the loss of lives during the riots were used as capital by the ISI,
the notorious secret service agency of Pakistan, to foment trouble and
terrorism. The following story is of one of the many well-planned acts of
terror whose genesis may be traced to the demolition of Babri Masjid.
*
In the early hours of 6 December 1993—the first anniversary of the
demolition of Babri Masjid—shocking news of bombings in five trains
were reported from different parts of the country, in which two passengers
were killed and twenty-two injured. Railway property worth lakhs of rupees
had been damaged. A sense of terror spread amongst railway workers and
passengers alike, affecting normal train service for a long time. Details of
the bombings are as follows:
At about 5.15 a.m. on 6 December 1993, a bomb kept under seat number
4 of coach C-7 of the Rajdhani Express en route to New Delhi from
Mumbai Central exploded between the Indergarh and Amli stations in the
Kota division of the Western Railway. The explosion resulted in five
passengers being grievously injured, but fortunately there were no fatalities.
At 6 a.m. on the same day, a bomb kept under seat number 135 of coach
D-1 of the Flying Queen Express, originating from Surat and going to
Mumbai, exploded, causing grievous injury to one passenger and
substantial damage to the railway coach.
A bomb planted in the toilet of the pantry car of the Rajdhani Express,
running between New Delhi and Kolkata, exploded at 10.30 a.m. on the
same day, between the Prempur and Karbigwan stations in the Allahabad
division of the Northern Railway. Two bearers in the pantry car sustained
grievous injuries and the coach was badly damaged.
Two bombs were also planted in the Rajdhani Express originating from
Kolkata and proceeding to New Delhi. One was placed in the toilet of coach
C-6 and the other in the toilet of C-2. One of the bombs went off at 5 a.m.,
but the other was detected well in time for it to be defused at Bhaupur
railway station in the Kanpur division of the Northern Railway.
A bomb placed under seat number 38 of coach 4895 of another
prestigious train, the Andhra Pradesh Express, exploded at 7.05 a.m. The
blast killed Ahmed Majid Ismail and Jeevan Jyoti—two hapless passengers
travelling in the coach—demonstrating that when a terrorist’s bomb
explodes or his automatic rifle fires, neither the bomb nor the rifle pay heed
to the religion or gender of their victims. In addition to these two fatalities,
fifteen passengers sustained grievous injuries and serious damage was
caused to the railway coach.
Yet another bomb placed in the Mumbai–Kurla Express was fortunately
detected and defused in time on the same day.
Five criminal cases were registered at railway police stations: at Kota in
Rajasthan, Kanpur (two cases) in Uttar Pradesh, Valsad in Gujarat and
Malkajgiri in Andhra Pradesh. The police departments, assisted by their
respective state crime branches, commenced investigations, but they were
unable to make any headway. The Government of India, cognizant of the
interstate nature of these crimes and their national importance, transferred
the five cases to the CBI through two notifications dated 21 December and
28 December 1993. The then director of CBI, K. Vijaya Rama Rao, decided
to entrust the investigation of these five cases to the nascent Special Task
Force (STF) that had been constituted in the CBI only six months earlier.
*
The STF was created in May 1993, primarily to investigate the 12 March
1993 serial bombings in Mumbai. In the wake of these blasts and their
catastrophic aftermath, several controversies had arisen related to the
investigation of the case by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch. Even though
the police had cracked the case and arrested several of the accused,
allegations of links between some of the perpetrators and powerful
politicians of the state, corruption and high-handedness on the part of the
police, and the sheer scale of the crime with national and transnational
ramifications led to a public outcry for the case to be transferred to the CBI.
The case came to the CBI on 19 November 1993 and we in the STF got
busy scrutinizing the voluminous documents that came with the case files
and figuring out what our course of action should be. There were several
loose ends to be tied up, further investigations to be conducted and
absconding accused to be arrested. I was the deputy inspector general (DIG)
in charge of the case in the STF. As it usually happens in the government,
when new units are created, they are formed using existing resources—both
human and material—by withdrawing them from one branch or another.
The number of hands given to you is small and so are other material
resources such as office space or transport. In the midst of these teething
troubles came the orders transferring the five serial train blast cases, which
demanded investigative legwork all over the country.
Without losing our focus on the Mumbai blasts, we began the process of
taking over the case files of the train bombings from the railway police of
Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Visits to the crime
scenes and consultations with local police officers followed.
In the midst of all this, on 13 January 1994, K. Vijaya Rama Rao called
me to his office in the North Block and directed me to proceed to
Hyderabad. Apparently, an informant of an ACP of the Hyderabad police
had secret information about the serial train blast cases that he wished to
share with the CBI. There was a possibility that the tip-off would require a
full-fledged operation in Mumbai. My immediate superior, Joint Director S.
Sen, was asked to leave for Mumbai, while I flew to Hyderabad to meet the
informant.
I reached Hyderabad at around 8 p.m. I was to stay in the local police
mess, but I drove straight from the airport to the office of the ACP, who was
a prominent member of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) in the Hyderabad
Police. The real name of the ACP eludes me now, but I remember that he
was popularly called Gabbar Singh. His colleagues, on account of his
imposing height, build and rather villainous looks that belied his friendly
disposition, had given him this moniker. It was a pleasure to meet him and
exchange details of the work being done by our respective units, which led
to an immediate kinship.
Soon the ACP sent for his informant and in walked a short and frail man
in his mid-thirties. He was unkempt and rather smelly. Gabbar Singh
introduced me to him saying that I was the CBI officer sent from Delhi to
follow up on the information he had. I tried my best to make the informant
feel at ease and soon he began to talk freely with me in his typical
Hyderabadi Hindi. His conversation with me, still etched in my memory,
went something like this: ‘Sahib, apne kuch jaante jo tumko batana kya?’
(Shall I tell you something that may be useful to you), he asked. When I
said he may, he asked me, ‘Kya aap AP Express ka bomb dhamaka case
dekhte?’ (Are you looking into the AP Express blast case?) When I replied
in the affirmative, he said, ‘Bombay me ek jagah hai Mominpura. Wahan ek
doctor hai jiska naam apun ko nahee maloom. Par uska khairat ka ek
hospital hai Mominpura mein. Woh mastermind hai, usko dhoondo, woh
aap ko sab bata sakta hai.’ (There is a place in Mumbai called Mominpura
where a Muslim doctor resides. He runs a charitable hospital but is the
mastermind behind the blasts. Please look for him.)
The information was rather sketchy, but I had to make the most of it. The
first logical step was to share it with my field officers in Mumbai. That
would require the exchange of information in real time between Satish Jha
—my able junior colleague and superintendent of police (SP) in Mumbai—
and myself. Mobile telephony had not reached India as yet. To add to my
woes, even the subscriber trunk dialling (STD) facility was not available on
Gabbar Singh’s office phone. (In those days, official telephones, whether at
home or at work, were provided with the STD facility only if they were for
the use of very senior-ranking officers. I also remember that a common
practice to avoid the misuse of the facility was to keep the telephone
instrument locked or to protect its use by means of a code that was known
only to the officers.)
So, I booked a trunk call (as inter-city calls were then called) and passed
the information on to Satish. Five years my junior, Satish was a hands-on
police officer known for his investigative and operational skills and had
been with me on several sensitive missions. He quickly collected his team
of handpicked officers and decided to rope in the Mumbai Police, which
was just as well. The residents of Mominpura, a sprawling shanty town
where the suspect supposedly lived, formed a well-knit community and
were not particularly appreciative of governmental agencies—least of all
the police—intruding into their territory.
An advance party comprising Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP)
Pramod Mudbhatkal and Inspector Raman Tyagi first tried to locate the
charitable hospital in Mominpura but drew a blank. Satish, heading the joint
police team of STF and Mumbai Police, did not wish to carry out obtrusive
inquiries for fear of crowds gathering and creating a law and order situation.
He called me on Gabbar Singh’s office number from a local STD booth in
Mominpura to ask if the informant had shared any further information. The
informant had by then given details of several landmarks, which I shared
with Satish. He and his officers looked for them but could locate neither the
charitable hospital nor the doctor’s whereabouts.
By then it was well past midnight and the residents of Mominpura had
retired for the day. Except for a few tea stalls and paan shops, all business
establishments had closed. The streets were relatively deserted, with stray
dogs barking at the alien policemen prowling the area. It had been hours
since the search had started. A few passers-by had begun to cast suspicious
glances at the CBI men, who were running out of time. Satish was losing
patience and getting tense. At a street corner, he spotted a taxi parked with
its driver sitting inside, waiting, perhaps, for his last customer before he
called it a day. On an impulse, Satish asked the cabby if he knew of a
charitable hospital in the neighbourhood as a close relative of his required
immediate medical attention. The cabby asked if Satish was looking for the
‘khairati’ (charitable) hospital run by Dr Jalees Ansari. Satish, ignorant of
the name of the man who ran the charitable hospital, took a chance and said
yes. The cabby gave precise directions not only to the hospital but also to
the chawl (shanty) where the doctor lived, which was on the floor above the
hospital. Luckily for Satish, he offered to walk with him and point out the
place.
As the cabby began to lock the car doors, Satish signalled Pramod and
Raman to follow him but at a distance. The police officers felt they were
finally in business. Adrenaline began to course through their veins and their
hearts began to pound uncontrollably. They knew, almost instinctively, that
their quarry was within sniffing distance, much like a predator on sighting
its prey.
Satish and the cabby, with Pramod and Raman in tow, reached their
destination in no time. The charitable hospital, with a prominent sign, stood
right before them, and above it was a row of chawls, all almost identical
and barely visible in the feeble light emanating from the municipal lamp
posts nearby. Satish asked the cabby if he could do him one last favour.
Could he accompany him to the doctor’s chawl lest he knock on the wrong
door? The cabby obliged, walking up the creaking stairs with him, down a
narrow corridor and right up to the doctor’s chawl. He knocked on the door,
announcing that someone needed medical attention urgently.
A young boy, aged about fourteen, opened the ramshackle door of the
shanty. Satish asked if Dr Ansari was at home. By then the bearded doctor,
who was in his early forties, came to the door and asked Satish what the
matter was. Satish engaged him in small talk about a non-existent patient in
need of medical help, while his two officers walked right into the chawl.
Before the doctor could object to the men walking uninvited into his house,
they started to look underneath the scant furniture and rummage through the
old, rusted trunks lying in the house. The doctor, enraged, began to curse at
Satish and his men and ordered them to leave his house. Just then, an officer
from Satish’s team forced open a steel trunk in the loft of the living room
and found weapons, detonators and wires inside. The discovery of arms and
bomb-making material put paid to the doctor’s protests.
The commotion at Dr Ansari’s house had woken up his neighbours. Word
of a police raid spread like wildfire, and a small crowd collected by the
roadside, a flight below the doctor’s chawl. The number of onlookers began
to increase by the second. The police team realized that they were likely to
be surrounded and overwhelmed. Satish sent a wireless message to the
Mumbai Police control room, using the handset of the local police team
escorting him, and asked for reinforcements. A fairly sizeable contingent of
armed police arrived at the spot. Nonetheless, the crowd was agitated as Dr
Ansari was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. As soon as the police
team emerged with Dr Ansari from his chawl, the crowd started raising
slogans against the cops. With great difficulty, the joint police team took Dr
Ansari out from Mominpura to the STF office, located near the Sachivalaya
in south Mumbai.
It was about 3 a.m. when Satish called to inform me of the developments.
I was delighted that my team had succeeded in making its first big arrest in
the case and had recovered weapons and bomb-making material. Calls were
made to and fro between Mumbai and Hyderabad. Gabbar Singh’s
informant was pleased to learn that the information given by him had
resulted in fruitful action.
It was close to 4 a.m. when I got to the police mess. In spite of being
fatigued and sleep-deprived, I was euphoric with success. We had made a
major breakthrough in a case that had seemed intractable until very recently.
I don’t know when I fell asleep.
I had barely slept a couple of hours when there was a knock on my door.
It was an officer from the Hyderabad Police who informed me that the
city’s commissioner of police, H.J. Dora, had invited me to breakfast at his
residence. Apparently, he too had received news of Dr Ansari’s arrest—
presumably from Gabbar Singh—and was keen to meet me.
Bleary-eyed and short on sleep, I reached the Dora residence where the
commissioner greeted me warmly. This invitation to breakfast was in
appreciation of the work we had done to arrest Dr Ansari. I was touched by
his gesture and felt even more encouraged to take the case to its logical
conclusion. Meeting Mr Dora was a dream come true for me since I had
heard so much about him. He was a gutsy professional who called a spade a
spade before his political masters, unmindful of the consequences. He was a
true leader of men, suave and soft-spoken, the sort of cop they no longer
make.
*
From the Dora residence I drove straight to the airport and took the first
flight to Mumbai. Thanks to Mumbai traffic, the journey from the airport to
south Mumbai took much longer than the flight from Hyderabad to
Mumbai. By the time I arrived at the STF office, my colleagues had
obtained the detainee’s police remand.
As I walked into Satish’s office, I saw Dr Ansari seated on a chair with
three CBI officers sitting around him and interrogating him. My colleagues
stood up to greet me as I walked in, and, in a dejected tone, one of them
said, ‘Sir, since morning the doctor has not uttered a word. He is even
refusing to acknowledge that weapons and detonators were recovered from
his house.’
On hearing this, I decided to try my luck at interrogating Dr Ansari. But
the man didn’t so much as blink. I felt at a loss as to what to do next. He
was frail-looking, and the question of being tough on him didn’t arise. As I
sat looking at the doctor, I knew that I had to get him talking and soon. We
had come this far, caught a man with weapons and detonators, but we
needed to go further. We had to get the contours of Dr Ansari’s conspiracy
and follow up on them. And for this, we needed the doctor to open up. But,
he was in no hurry to give in and proved to be a tough nut to crack.
Many emotions stirred within me and several thoughts crossed my mind.
Almost instinctively, I addressed the detainee and said, ‘Doctor, if I brought
your holy book here, would you swear by it and say that you know
nothing?’ Dr Ansari froze and looked into my eyes meekly and helplessly.
His face contorted and he burst into tears. He wept uncontrollably as his
resolve to hold back what he knew broke on hearing mention of his holy
book. Clearly, he was a deeply religious man, to the extent of being a
fanatic. He could withstand the psychological pressures of a police
interrogation; he could deal with being publicly shamed, as he had been the
night before when he was whisked away by the police in the presence of his
brethren; he could live with the prospect of his imminent separation from
his family; but, under no circumstances could he swear by his holy book
and lie. He kept crying and mumbling to himself inaudibly. I was tempted
to hold him and comfort him but held myself back. The doctor gradually
came to terms with himself. Slowly, he regained his composure and began
to talk about himself, his radicalization, the coming together of a committed
group of people and so on. He was blurting out information as if he wished
to purge himself of the immense reservoir of emotions bottled up inside
him. He spoke so freely and rapidly that it was difficult to keep pace with
him while recording his copious disclosures in black and white. Such an
outpouring was nothing new for us. Many a time, when a criminal breaks
down during an interrogation, he no longer wishes to hold back any
information. All he wants is to get rid of every last secret buried in his
psyche and be at peace with himself. He cares little for the consequences of
his confession. In the police lingo of north India this is alluded to as ‘woh
khul gaya’ (he has opened up).
Doctor Ansari poured his heart out and gave us the details of his life;
how he had turned from being a benevolent physician to a radical
fundamentalist and finally, a terrorist.
*
Jalees Ansari was born and raised in the Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. A
bright student with dreams of becoming a doctor, he moved to Mumbai to
study medicine. By dint of hard work, he made it to Sion Medical College
and successfully earned his MBBS degree. He joined the public health
department of the then Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1983. He got
married soon after and settled down in Mominpura, one of the many
predominantly Muslim shanty towns of Mumbai. Deeply religious by
nature, he came under the influence of Ahl-e-Hadees, a religious movement
started in north India in the mid-nineteenth century that believes in
following Islam in its original and purest form. He would frequent only
such mosques where Ahl-e-Haees followers congregated. Occasionally,
clergy from other parts of India would visit these mosques and give fiery
and provocative speeches on alleged atrocities committed against Muslims
in Kashmir. Prominent amongst such speakers was Azam Ghauri, an
Islamist from Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh. He was a brilliant orator who
had links with Naxalites and LeT. He had received extensive training in
subversive activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan and was wanted for
several crimes in Andhra Pradesh, including the murder of a senior police
officer in Hyderabad.
Dr Ansari struck up a friendship with Ghauri and was deeply influenced
by his radical views on seeking revenge on the Government of India and the
majority community. During one of his visits to the Mominpura mosque in
1986–87, one Abdul Karim aka Tunda (a moniker given in some parts of
north India to anyone with only one arm) accompanied Ghauri. An
experienced and determined agent provocateur working for Pakistan’s ISI,
Tunda had plans to carry out terror attacks in and around Mumbai. He soon
realized that Dr Ansari was the right person to collaborate with in this
mission.
But before we continue with the story of their partnership, a word or two
about Tunda. Born in an impoverished family in Delhi in 1943, he moved to
his native village Pilakhuwa in the Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh to
study at a madrasa. From an early age he showed signs of religious
fanaticism. In the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in India, he
began his search for answers to the question why Muslims in India were
doomed to be passive victims in the face of oppression by the majority
community. In 1985, he was a witness to serious communal riots in his
native village when he saw his relatives being burnt alive by mobs. Several
Muslim-run shops and a mosque were targeted by the rampaging
marauders. These events turned him into a rabid fundamentalist and easy
prey for the ISI.
In 1993 he went to Pakistan and received training in LeT-run training
camps. On his return, he was responsible for over forty bombings in India.
He convinced Dr Ansari that mere discussions and proclamations on the
problems of Muslims would do little good for the oppressed minority
community and it was time to take some direct and decisive action. Tunda
convinced the doctor to learn the use of firearms and the technique of
making bombs. The doctor wanted to know where he could get such
training. Tunda was ready to teach him bomb-making then and there. He
had brought with him explosive material, detonators, timers, etc. The
doctor, who had until then examined patients suffering from physiological
ailments and helped them with cures, was persuaded in no time to learn
bomb-making. The doctor was ready to kill innocent people with his new
skills, unmindful of what his medical education had prepared him for. The
metamorphosis the good doctor had undergone amazed Jalees Ansari
himself. Dr Jekyll had turned into Mr Hyde.
The coming together of Azam Ghauri, Abdul Karim Tunda and Dr Jalees
Ansari was a meeting of three evil and dangerous minds. Both Ansari and
his mentor Tunda kept in touch and soon the latter sent fresh supplies of
explosive material to Ansari. In the interim, Ansari had collected a small
team of like-minded people, all based in Mumbai, all ready to do his
bidding. Tunda came down to Mumbai and made bombs at Dr Ansari’s
residence, which the doctor and three of his compatriots—Saleem, Bachchu
and Raees—planted in five gurdwaras in Andheri, Khar, Sion, Haliwada
and CST station to incite communal disaffection amongst Sikhs. This was
the first criminal activity the doctor had indulged in. There was no looking
back for him thereafter. He and his team members, all belonging to the Ahle-
Hadees school of thought, now had expertise in making and planting
bombs. The year was 1989.
*
Dr Ansari’s campaign against the majority community and the
establishment in general came to a head after December 1992, when the
Babri Masjid was demolished. Sensing the strong anti-Hindu feeling
amongst the Muslims, Ahl-e-Hadees members collected arms, ammunition
and explosives in ample quantities to give further impetus to their
campaign.
After targeting the gurdwaras, Ansari’s team targeted several police
station premises in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena office and the election office of
Dr Datta Samant (a prominent labour leader). A few explosions caused
fatalities, but the group eluded law enforcement agencies and the
intelligence fraternity of the country. By then prosperous Muslim
benefactors had begun to come forward to finance the criminal activities of
the doctor and his team.
During this period, Ansari met one Ashfaque Khan at the office of a close
relative. Ashfaque was a mining contractor in Dausa, Rajasthan, and he and
Ansari hit it off well. Ashfaque took it upon himself to divert explosive
material from government supplies given to him for mining work. The
doctor went to Dausa, where he received enough explosive material from
Ashfaque to keep him in business for a long time.
By the middle of 1993, Dr Ansari’s team was going from strength to
strength. The terror module was planting bombs further afield from
Mumbai in places such as Hyderabad and Gulbarga in Karnataka. Thanks to
Tunda, Dr Ansari’s circle of associates had assumed a pan-Indian character.
Tunda had introduced him to prominent Ahl-e-Hadees members such as Dr
Habib of Rae Bareli and Dr Jamal Alvi of Lucknow.
In August 1993, the leading lights of Ahl-e-Hadees met at Dr Alvi’s
residence in Lucknow. It was decided to step up the activities of the group
and call it ‘Crush India Force’. Another meeting was held in September
1993, again in Lucknow, during which it was decided to undertake dramatic
action on the first anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid. It was Dr
Ansari who proposed that prestigious trains such as the Rajdhani Express
and the Andhra Pradesh Express should be targeted to strike at the elite
class of society travelling in such trains, so that the government felt the heat
of their action.
In pursuance of this conspiracy, different modules were created to
execute six blasts, which would take place in the Rajdhani Express from
Delhi to Kolkata, the Rajdhani Express from Kolkata to New Delhi, the
Andhra Pradesh Express from Hyderabad to New Delhi, the Flying Queen
from Surat to Mumbai and the Mumbai–Kurla Express. It was unanimously
decided that the explosions would go off in the early hours of 6 December
1993 (the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition). Bombs were
assembled at the residence of Dr Ansari, then taken by different submodules
to various locations where the bombers stayed at cheap hotels
under fake names. They reserved seats under assumed identities, boarded
the trains as planned and planted the bombs minutes before getting off at
predetermined stations. The timers of the bombs were set to detonate
between 5 a.m. and 10.30 a.m.
Five of the six bombs went off as planned. The sixth bomb, which was
placed in the Mumbai–Kurla Express, was detected in time and defused
without causing any harm.
With the news of each explosion, panic spread amongst train passengers
and railway authorities alike. Trains were stopped at the first available
stations—often nondescript and remote with little infrastructure—and
searched by railway police. A few passengers disembarked from their trains
and ran for safety. Railway traffic and train schedules went haywire and
took days to normalize. Further, as information poured in from remote
railway police stations through the nationwide police wireless network
(POLNET), a sense of alarm gripped state and government authorities,
including police and intelligence agencies. Uncomfortable questions were
directed at several people in positions of authority, demanding explanations
for the intelligence failure. Indeed, a nationwide terror network had struck
at different locations in a well-orchestrated attack without anyone getting
even a whiff of either the likelihood of these strikes or the identities of the
perpetrators. Some people in government, especially in the intelligence
agencies—both state and Central—owed the people an explanation.
This incident, coupled with earlier blasts perpetrated by the same group,
called into question the authorities’ claim of having resolved the serial
bomb blast cases that had occurred only months earlier in March 1993,
further adding to the sense of fear and panic. Many detractors of Mumbai
Police contended that if the real perpetrators of the crime had been arrested
or identified, how were blasts still occurring in and around Mumbai? The
significance of the date of the attacks—6 December 1993—was not lost on
anyone.
*
After the arrest of Dr Ansari and the disclosures made by him, we in the
STF conducted simultaneous raids across the country in which fifteen other
associates were either arrested or identified. These operations were
conducted in close coordination with the local police of Lucknow and Rae
Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, the Dausa Police in Rajasthan and the Gulbarga
Police in Karnataka. During the investigation, evidence such as train
reservation forms, entries and signatures in hotel registers, eyewitness
accounts, confessions recorded under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities
(Prevention) Act (referred to as TADA), and explosive material and
weapons from the individuals accused were collected. A charge sheet was
filed in August 1994 in a TADA court in Ajmer. Earlier, all the bomb blast
cases had been clubbed together and were being investigated by us as a
single case. The trial of this case dragged on for nearly ten years and the
final court order came on 28 February 2004, convicting all accused and
sentencing them to life imprisonment.* O.P. Chhatwal, my SP in Delhi,
played a major role in marshalling the evidence, presenting it in court and
securing the convictions. The conviction of all fifteen accused individuals
with sentences to life imprisonment in a single case was a rare occurrence
in the history of the Indian police.
Dr Ansari and his co-conspirators are today in Ajmer Central Jail serving
their life sentences. On 6 April 2000, Azam Ghauri, one of the three
masterminds, was killed in an encounter with Hyderabad Police in Jagtiyal,
now in Telangana state. Seventeen years after the killing of Azam Ghauri,
the Delhi Police arrested the third mastermind, Abdul Karim Tunda, at the
Indo-Nepal border on 16 August 2017. He is currently lodged in Ajmer Jail
and is still undergoing trial in the serial train blast cases of 6 December
1993.
This was one of the major cases I was associated with during my nineyear
stint in the CBI. The unearthing of the countrywide network of a terror
group, whose existence was, until then, unknown to any state police force
or to any intelligence agency, has been a matter of great personal
satisfaction. Besides the resolution of the serial train blast cases, the
mystery behind over forty intermittent bomb blasts in and around Mumbai,
including the blasts at gurdwaras and police stations, was solved. A deadly
terror group had been identified and put away and scores of people saved
from deadly terror attacks.
modern India. On this fateful day, Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque
reportedly built by the Mughal general Mir Baqi, was demolished by
thousands of volunteers—known as kar sevaks. The kar sevaks are rightwing
Hindu fundamentalists, and they believe that an ancient temple was
razed to the ground to build the mosque. Demolition of the centuries-old
structure breached the fragile amity between the Hindu and Muslim
communities of India like few other events ever have. The circumstances
leading up to this tragic event are worth a mention.
In Hindu tradition, the city of Ayodhya, in the north Indian state of Uttar
Pradesh, is believed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama, the seventh
incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Some Hindus believe that Rama was
born at the same site where Mir Baqi built the mosque after demolishing a
temple of Rama, though historical evidence to support this contention is
scarce. For over four centuries, both Hindus and Muslims used the site for
religious purposes. Then in 1822, an official of the local court at Faizabad
made the claim that the mosque stood on the site of a temple. Ever since
then a dispute over the title of the land has festered between claimants of
Hindu and Muslim communities and has led to discord between them from
time to time.
In the 1980s the dispute came to a head when the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP), a right-wing fundamentalist organization, began a campaign for the
construction of a temple dedicated to Rama at the site of the mosque. On 6
December 1992, VHP organized a rally of roughly 1,50,000 kar sevaks that
turned violent. The kar sevaks overwhelmed security forces and tore down
the mosque. The demolition resulted in several months of communal riots
between Hindus and Muslims, causing the death of at least 2000 people.
Shock waves spread not only to different parts of the country but also to
distant corners of the world, enraging the Muslim community and
tarnishing the image of India as a secular and tolerant nation. Retaliatory
violence against Hindus and their religious places was reported in Pakistan,
Bangladesh and the Middle East.
In India, the repercussions—besides communal riots and killings—were
seen in the increase in acts of terror, such as the deadly serial bombings in
Mumbai on 12 March 1993 that claimed 279 lives, caused injuries to nearly
700 people and damage to property, both public and private, worth
hundreds of crores of rupees. The divisive atmosphere in the country and
the latent wrath in the Muslim community over the demolition of the
mosque and the loss of lives during the riots were used as capital by the ISI,
the notorious secret service agency of Pakistan, to foment trouble and
terrorism. The following story is of one of the many well-planned acts of
terror whose genesis may be traced to the demolition of Babri Masjid.
*
In the early hours of 6 December 1993—the first anniversary of the
demolition of Babri Masjid—shocking news of bombings in five trains
were reported from different parts of the country, in which two passengers
were killed and twenty-two injured. Railway property worth lakhs of rupees
had been damaged. A sense of terror spread amongst railway workers and
passengers alike, affecting normal train service for a long time. Details of
the bombings are as follows:
At about 5.15 a.m. on 6 December 1993, a bomb kept under seat number
4 of coach C-7 of the Rajdhani Express en route to New Delhi from
Mumbai Central exploded between the Indergarh and Amli stations in the
Kota division of the Western Railway. The explosion resulted in five
passengers being grievously injured, but fortunately there were no fatalities.
At 6 a.m. on the same day, a bomb kept under seat number 135 of coach
D-1 of the Flying Queen Express, originating from Surat and going to
Mumbai, exploded, causing grievous injury to one passenger and
substantial damage to the railway coach.
A bomb planted in the toilet of the pantry car of the Rajdhani Express,
running between New Delhi and Kolkata, exploded at 10.30 a.m. on the
same day, between the Prempur and Karbigwan stations in the Allahabad
division of the Northern Railway. Two bearers in the pantry car sustained
grievous injuries and the coach was badly damaged.
Two bombs were also planted in the Rajdhani Express originating from
Kolkata and proceeding to New Delhi. One was placed in the toilet of coach
C-6 and the other in the toilet of C-2. One of the bombs went off at 5 a.m.,
but the other was detected well in time for it to be defused at Bhaupur
railway station in the Kanpur division of the Northern Railway.
A bomb placed under seat number 38 of coach 4895 of another
prestigious train, the Andhra Pradesh Express, exploded at 7.05 a.m. The
blast killed Ahmed Majid Ismail and Jeevan Jyoti—two hapless passengers
travelling in the coach—demonstrating that when a terrorist’s bomb
explodes or his automatic rifle fires, neither the bomb nor the rifle pay heed
to the religion or gender of their victims. In addition to these two fatalities,
fifteen passengers sustained grievous injuries and serious damage was
caused to the railway coach.
Yet another bomb placed in the Mumbai–Kurla Express was fortunately
detected and defused in time on the same day.
Five criminal cases were registered at railway police stations: at Kota in
Rajasthan, Kanpur (two cases) in Uttar Pradesh, Valsad in Gujarat and
Malkajgiri in Andhra Pradesh. The police departments, assisted by their
respective state crime branches, commenced investigations, but they were
unable to make any headway. The Government of India, cognizant of the
interstate nature of these crimes and their national importance, transferred
the five cases to the CBI through two notifications dated 21 December and
28 December 1993. The then director of CBI, K. Vijaya Rama Rao, decided
to entrust the investigation of these five cases to the nascent Special Task
Force (STF) that had been constituted in the CBI only six months earlier.
*
The STF was created in May 1993, primarily to investigate the 12 March
1993 serial bombings in Mumbai. In the wake of these blasts and their
catastrophic aftermath, several controversies had arisen related to the
investigation of the case by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch. Even though
the police had cracked the case and arrested several of the accused,
allegations of links between some of the perpetrators and powerful
politicians of the state, corruption and high-handedness on the part of the
police, and the sheer scale of the crime with national and transnational
ramifications led to a public outcry for the case to be transferred to the CBI.
The case came to the CBI on 19 November 1993 and we in the STF got
busy scrutinizing the voluminous documents that came with the case files
and figuring out what our course of action should be. There were several
loose ends to be tied up, further investigations to be conducted and
absconding accused to be arrested. I was the deputy inspector general (DIG)
in charge of the case in the STF. As it usually happens in the government,
when new units are created, they are formed using existing resources—both
human and material—by withdrawing them from one branch or another.
The number of hands given to you is small and so are other material
resources such as office space or transport. In the midst of these teething
troubles came the orders transferring the five serial train blast cases, which
demanded investigative legwork all over the country.
Without losing our focus on the Mumbai blasts, we began the process of
taking over the case files of the train bombings from the railway police of
Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Visits to the crime
scenes and consultations with local police officers followed.
In the midst of all this, on 13 January 1994, K. Vijaya Rama Rao called
me to his office in the North Block and directed me to proceed to
Hyderabad. Apparently, an informant of an ACP of the Hyderabad police
had secret information about the serial train blast cases that he wished to
share with the CBI. There was a possibility that the tip-off would require a
full-fledged operation in Mumbai. My immediate superior, Joint Director S.
Sen, was asked to leave for Mumbai, while I flew to Hyderabad to meet the
informant.
I reached Hyderabad at around 8 p.m. I was to stay in the local police
mess, but I drove straight from the airport to the office of the ACP, who was
a prominent member of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) in the Hyderabad
Police. The real name of the ACP eludes me now, but I remember that he
was popularly called Gabbar Singh. His colleagues, on account of his
imposing height, build and rather villainous looks that belied his friendly
disposition, had given him this moniker. It was a pleasure to meet him and
exchange details of the work being done by our respective units, which led
to an immediate kinship.
Soon the ACP sent for his informant and in walked a short and frail man
in his mid-thirties. He was unkempt and rather smelly. Gabbar Singh
introduced me to him saying that I was the CBI officer sent from Delhi to
follow up on the information he had. I tried my best to make the informant
feel at ease and soon he began to talk freely with me in his typical
Hyderabadi Hindi. His conversation with me, still etched in my memory,
went something like this: ‘Sahib, apne kuch jaante jo tumko batana kya?’
(Shall I tell you something that may be useful to you), he asked. When I
said he may, he asked me, ‘Kya aap AP Express ka bomb dhamaka case
dekhte?’ (Are you looking into the AP Express blast case?) When I replied
in the affirmative, he said, ‘Bombay me ek jagah hai Mominpura. Wahan ek
doctor hai jiska naam apun ko nahee maloom. Par uska khairat ka ek
hospital hai Mominpura mein. Woh mastermind hai, usko dhoondo, woh
aap ko sab bata sakta hai.’ (There is a place in Mumbai called Mominpura
where a Muslim doctor resides. He runs a charitable hospital but is the
mastermind behind the blasts. Please look for him.)
The information was rather sketchy, but I had to make the most of it. The
first logical step was to share it with my field officers in Mumbai. That
would require the exchange of information in real time between Satish Jha
—my able junior colleague and superintendent of police (SP) in Mumbai—
and myself. Mobile telephony had not reached India as yet. To add to my
woes, even the subscriber trunk dialling (STD) facility was not available on
Gabbar Singh’s office phone. (In those days, official telephones, whether at
home or at work, were provided with the STD facility only if they were for
the use of very senior-ranking officers. I also remember that a common
practice to avoid the misuse of the facility was to keep the telephone
instrument locked or to protect its use by means of a code that was known
only to the officers.)
So, I booked a trunk call (as inter-city calls were then called) and passed
the information on to Satish. Five years my junior, Satish was a hands-on
police officer known for his investigative and operational skills and had
been with me on several sensitive missions. He quickly collected his team
of handpicked officers and decided to rope in the Mumbai Police, which
was just as well. The residents of Mominpura, a sprawling shanty town
where the suspect supposedly lived, formed a well-knit community and
were not particularly appreciative of governmental agencies—least of all
the police—intruding into their territory.
An advance party comprising Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP)
Pramod Mudbhatkal and Inspector Raman Tyagi first tried to locate the
charitable hospital in Mominpura but drew a blank. Satish, heading the joint
police team of STF and Mumbai Police, did not wish to carry out obtrusive
inquiries for fear of crowds gathering and creating a law and order situation.
He called me on Gabbar Singh’s office number from a local STD booth in
Mominpura to ask if the informant had shared any further information. The
informant had by then given details of several landmarks, which I shared
with Satish. He and his officers looked for them but could locate neither the
charitable hospital nor the doctor’s whereabouts.
By then it was well past midnight and the residents of Mominpura had
retired for the day. Except for a few tea stalls and paan shops, all business
establishments had closed. The streets were relatively deserted, with stray
dogs barking at the alien policemen prowling the area. It had been hours
since the search had started. A few passers-by had begun to cast suspicious
glances at the CBI men, who were running out of time. Satish was losing
patience and getting tense. At a street corner, he spotted a taxi parked with
its driver sitting inside, waiting, perhaps, for his last customer before he
called it a day. On an impulse, Satish asked the cabby if he knew of a
charitable hospital in the neighbourhood as a close relative of his required
immediate medical attention. The cabby asked if Satish was looking for the
‘khairati’ (charitable) hospital run by Dr Jalees Ansari. Satish, ignorant of
the name of the man who ran the charitable hospital, took a chance and said
yes. The cabby gave precise directions not only to the hospital but also to
the chawl (shanty) where the doctor lived, which was on the floor above the
hospital. Luckily for Satish, he offered to walk with him and point out the
place.
As the cabby began to lock the car doors, Satish signalled Pramod and
Raman to follow him but at a distance. The police officers felt they were
finally in business. Adrenaline began to course through their veins and their
hearts began to pound uncontrollably. They knew, almost instinctively, that
their quarry was within sniffing distance, much like a predator on sighting
its prey.
Satish and the cabby, with Pramod and Raman in tow, reached their
destination in no time. The charitable hospital, with a prominent sign, stood
right before them, and above it was a row of chawls, all almost identical
and barely visible in the feeble light emanating from the municipal lamp
posts nearby. Satish asked the cabby if he could do him one last favour.
Could he accompany him to the doctor’s chawl lest he knock on the wrong
door? The cabby obliged, walking up the creaking stairs with him, down a
narrow corridor and right up to the doctor’s chawl. He knocked on the door,
announcing that someone needed medical attention urgently.
A young boy, aged about fourteen, opened the ramshackle door of the
shanty. Satish asked if Dr Ansari was at home. By then the bearded doctor,
who was in his early forties, came to the door and asked Satish what the
matter was. Satish engaged him in small talk about a non-existent patient in
need of medical help, while his two officers walked right into the chawl.
Before the doctor could object to the men walking uninvited into his house,
they started to look underneath the scant furniture and rummage through the
old, rusted trunks lying in the house. The doctor, enraged, began to curse at
Satish and his men and ordered them to leave his house. Just then, an officer
from Satish’s team forced open a steel trunk in the loft of the living room
and found weapons, detonators and wires inside. The discovery of arms and
bomb-making material put paid to the doctor’s protests.
The commotion at Dr Ansari’s house had woken up his neighbours. Word
of a police raid spread like wildfire, and a small crowd collected by the
roadside, a flight below the doctor’s chawl. The number of onlookers began
to increase by the second. The police team realized that they were likely to
be surrounded and overwhelmed. Satish sent a wireless message to the
Mumbai Police control room, using the handset of the local police team
escorting him, and asked for reinforcements. A fairly sizeable contingent of
armed police arrived at the spot. Nonetheless, the crowd was agitated as Dr
Ansari was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. As soon as the police
team emerged with Dr Ansari from his chawl, the crowd started raising
slogans against the cops. With great difficulty, the joint police team took Dr
Ansari out from Mominpura to the STF office, located near the Sachivalaya
in south Mumbai.
It was about 3 a.m. when Satish called to inform me of the developments.
I was delighted that my team had succeeded in making its first big arrest in
the case and had recovered weapons and bomb-making material. Calls were
made to and fro between Mumbai and Hyderabad. Gabbar Singh’s
informant was pleased to learn that the information given by him had
resulted in fruitful action.
It was close to 4 a.m. when I got to the police mess. In spite of being
fatigued and sleep-deprived, I was euphoric with success. We had made a
major breakthrough in a case that had seemed intractable until very recently.
I don’t know when I fell asleep.
I had barely slept a couple of hours when there was a knock on my door.
It was an officer from the Hyderabad Police who informed me that the
city’s commissioner of police, H.J. Dora, had invited me to breakfast at his
residence. Apparently, he too had received news of Dr Ansari’s arrest—
presumably from Gabbar Singh—and was keen to meet me.
Bleary-eyed and short on sleep, I reached the Dora residence where the
commissioner greeted me warmly. This invitation to breakfast was in
appreciation of the work we had done to arrest Dr Ansari. I was touched by
his gesture and felt even more encouraged to take the case to its logical
conclusion. Meeting Mr Dora was a dream come true for me since I had
heard so much about him. He was a gutsy professional who called a spade a
spade before his political masters, unmindful of the consequences. He was a
true leader of men, suave and soft-spoken, the sort of cop they no longer
make.
*
From the Dora residence I drove straight to the airport and took the first
flight to Mumbai. Thanks to Mumbai traffic, the journey from the airport to
south Mumbai took much longer than the flight from Hyderabad to
Mumbai. By the time I arrived at the STF office, my colleagues had
obtained the detainee’s police remand.
As I walked into Satish’s office, I saw Dr Ansari seated on a chair with
three CBI officers sitting around him and interrogating him. My colleagues
stood up to greet me as I walked in, and, in a dejected tone, one of them
said, ‘Sir, since morning the doctor has not uttered a word. He is even
refusing to acknowledge that weapons and detonators were recovered from
his house.’
On hearing this, I decided to try my luck at interrogating Dr Ansari. But
the man didn’t so much as blink. I felt at a loss as to what to do next. He
was frail-looking, and the question of being tough on him didn’t arise. As I
sat looking at the doctor, I knew that I had to get him talking and soon. We
had come this far, caught a man with weapons and detonators, but we
needed to go further. We had to get the contours of Dr Ansari’s conspiracy
and follow up on them. And for this, we needed the doctor to open up. But,
he was in no hurry to give in and proved to be a tough nut to crack.
Many emotions stirred within me and several thoughts crossed my mind.
Almost instinctively, I addressed the detainee and said, ‘Doctor, if I brought
your holy book here, would you swear by it and say that you know
nothing?’ Dr Ansari froze and looked into my eyes meekly and helplessly.
His face contorted and he burst into tears. He wept uncontrollably as his
resolve to hold back what he knew broke on hearing mention of his holy
book. Clearly, he was a deeply religious man, to the extent of being a
fanatic. He could withstand the psychological pressures of a police
interrogation; he could deal with being publicly shamed, as he had been the
night before when he was whisked away by the police in the presence of his
brethren; he could live with the prospect of his imminent separation from
his family; but, under no circumstances could he swear by his holy book
and lie. He kept crying and mumbling to himself inaudibly. I was tempted
to hold him and comfort him but held myself back. The doctor gradually
came to terms with himself. Slowly, he regained his composure and began
to talk about himself, his radicalization, the coming together of a committed
group of people and so on. He was blurting out information as if he wished
to purge himself of the immense reservoir of emotions bottled up inside
him. He spoke so freely and rapidly that it was difficult to keep pace with
him while recording his copious disclosures in black and white. Such an
outpouring was nothing new for us. Many a time, when a criminal breaks
down during an interrogation, he no longer wishes to hold back any
information. All he wants is to get rid of every last secret buried in his
psyche and be at peace with himself. He cares little for the consequences of
his confession. In the police lingo of north India this is alluded to as ‘woh
khul gaya’ (he has opened up).
Doctor Ansari poured his heart out and gave us the details of his life;
how he had turned from being a benevolent physician to a radical
fundamentalist and finally, a terrorist.
*
Jalees Ansari was born and raised in the Basti district of Uttar Pradesh. A
bright student with dreams of becoming a doctor, he moved to Mumbai to
study medicine. By dint of hard work, he made it to Sion Medical College
and successfully earned his MBBS degree. He joined the public health
department of the then Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1983. He got
married soon after and settled down in Mominpura, one of the many
predominantly Muslim shanty towns of Mumbai. Deeply religious by
nature, he came under the influence of Ahl-e-Hadees, a religious movement
started in north India in the mid-nineteenth century that believes in
following Islam in its original and purest form. He would frequent only
such mosques where Ahl-e-Haees followers congregated. Occasionally,
clergy from other parts of India would visit these mosques and give fiery
and provocative speeches on alleged atrocities committed against Muslims
in Kashmir. Prominent amongst such speakers was Azam Ghauri, an
Islamist from Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh. He was a brilliant orator who
had links with Naxalites and LeT. He had received extensive training in
subversive activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan and was wanted for
several crimes in Andhra Pradesh, including the murder of a senior police
officer in Hyderabad.
Dr Ansari struck up a friendship with Ghauri and was deeply influenced
by his radical views on seeking revenge on the Government of India and the
majority community. During one of his visits to the Mominpura mosque in
1986–87, one Abdul Karim aka Tunda (a moniker given in some parts of
north India to anyone with only one arm) accompanied Ghauri. An
experienced and determined agent provocateur working for Pakistan’s ISI,
Tunda had plans to carry out terror attacks in and around Mumbai. He soon
realized that Dr Ansari was the right person to collaborate with in this
mission.
But before we continue with the story of their partnership, a word or two
about Tunda. Born in an impoverished family in Delhi in 1943, he moved to
his native village Pilakhuwa in the Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh to
study at a madrasa. From an early age he showed signs of religious
fanaticism. In the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in India, he
began his search for answers to the question why Muslims in India were
doomed to be passive victims in the face of oppression by the majority
community. In 1985, he was a witness to serious communal riots in his
native village when he saw his relatives being burnt alive by mobs. Several
Muslim-run shops and a mosque were targeted by the rampaging
marauders. These events turned him into a rabid fundamentalist and easy
prey for the ISI.
In 1993 he went to Pakistan and received training in LeT-run training
camps. On his return, he was responsible for over forty bombings in India.
He convinced Dr Ansari that mere discussions and proclamations on the
problems of Muslims would do little good for the oppressed minority
community and it was time to take some direct and decisive action. Tunda
convinced the doctor to learn the use of firearms and the technique of
making bombs. The doctor wanted to know where he could get such
training. Tunda was ready to teach him bomb-making then and there. He
had brought with him explosive material, detonators, timers, etc. The
doctor, who had until then examined patients suffering from physiological
ailments and helped them with cures, was persuaded in no time to learn
bomb-making. The doctor was ready to kill innocent people with his new
skills, unmindful of what his medical education had prepared him for. The
metamorphosis the good doctor had undergone amazed Jalees Ansari
himself. Dr Jekyll had turned into Mr Hyde.
The coming together of Azam Ghauri, Abdul Karim Tunda and Dr Jalees
Ansari was a meeting of three evil and dangerous minds. Both Ansari and
his mentor Tunda kept in touch and soon the latter sent fresh supplies of
explosive material to Ansari. In the interim, Ansari had collected a small
team of like-minded people, all based in Mumbai, all ready to do his
bidding. Tunda came down to Mumbai and made bombs at Dr Ansari’s
residence, which the doctor and three of his compatriots—Saleem, Bachchu
and Raees—planted in five gurdwaras in Andheri, Khar, Sion, Haliwada
and CST station to incite communal disaffection amongst Sikhs. This was
the first criminal activity the doctor had indulged in. There was no looking
back for him thereafter. He and his team members, all belonging to the Ahle-
Hadees school of thought, now had expertise in making and planting
bombs. The year was 1989.
*
Dr Ansari’s campaign against the majority community and the
establishment in general came to a head after December 1992, when the
Babri Masjid was demolished. Sensing the strong anti-Hindu feeling
amongst the Muslims, Ahl-e-Hadees members collected arms, ammunition
and explosives in ample quantities to give further impetus to their
campaign.
After targeting the gurdwaras, Ansari’s team targeted several police
station premises in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena office and the election office of
Dr Datta Samant (a prominent labour leader). A few explosions caused
fatalities, but the group eluded law enforcement agencies and the
intelligence fraternity of the country. By then prosperous Muslim
benefactors had begun to come forward to finance the criminal activities of
the doctor and his team.
During this period, Ansari met one Ashfaque Khan at the office of a close
relative. Ashfaque was a mining contractor in Dausa, Rajasthan, and he and
Ansari hit it off well. Ashfaque took it upon himself to divert explosive
material from government supplies given to him for mining work. The
doctor went to Dausa, where he received enough explosive material from
Ashfaque to keep him in business for a long time.
By the middle of 1993, Dr Ansari’s team was going from strength to
strength. The terror module was planting bombs further afield from
Mumbai in places such as Hyderabad and Gulbarga in Karnataka. Thanks to
Tunda, Dr Ansari’s circle of associates had assumed a pan-Indian character.
Tunda had introduced him to prominent Ahl-e-Hadees members such as Dr
Habib of Rae Bareli and Dr Jamal Alvi of Lucknow.
In August 1993, the leading lights of Ahl-e-Hadees met at Dr Alvi’s
residence in Lucknow. It was decided to step up the activities of the group
and call it ‘Crush India Force’. Another meeting was held in September
1993, again in Lucknow, during which it was decided to undertake dramatic
action on the first anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid. It was Dr
Ansari who proposed that prestigious trains such as the Rajdhani Express
and the Andhra Pradesh Express should be targeted to strike at the elite
class of society travelling in such trains, so that the government felt the heat
of their action.
In pursuance of this conspiracy, different modules were created to
execute six blasts, which would take place in the Rajdhani Express from
Delhi to Kolkata, the Rajdhani Express from Kolkata to New Delhi, the
Andhra Pradesh Express from Hyderabad to New Delhi, the Flying Queen
from Surat to Mumbai and the Mumbai–Kurla Express. It was unanimously
decided that the explosions would go off in the early hours of 6 December
1993 (the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition). Bombs were
assembled at the residence of Dr Ansari, then taken by different submodules
to various locations where the bombers stayed at cheap hotels
under fake names. They reserved seats under assumed identities, boarded
the trains as planned and planted the bombs minutes before getting off at
predetermined stations. The timers of the bombs were set to detonate
between 5 a.m. and 10.30 a.m.
Five of the six bombs went off as planned. The sixth bomb, which was
placed in the Mumbai–Kurla Express, was detected in time and defused
without causing any harm.
With the news of each explosion, panic spread amongst train passengers
and railway authorities alike. Trains were stopped at the first available
stations—often nondescript and remote with little infrastructure—and
searched by railway police. A few passengers disembarked from their trains
and ran for safety. Railway traffic and train schedules went haywire and
took days to normalize. Further, as information poured in from remote
railway police stations through the nationwide police wireless network
(POLNET), a sense of alarm gripped state and government authorities,
including police and intelligence agencies. Uncomfortable questions were
directed at several people in positions of authority, demanding explanations
for the intelligence failure. Indeed, a nationwide terror network had struck
at different locations in a well-orchestrated attack without anyone getting
even a whiff of either the likelihood of these strikes or the identities of the
perpetrators. Some people in government, especially in the intelligence
agencies—both state and Central—owed the people an explanation.
This incident, coupled with earlier blasts perpetrated by the same group,
called into question the authorities’ claim of having resolved the serial
bomb blast cases that had occurred only months earlier in March 1993,
further adding to the sense of fear and panic. Many detractors of Mumbai
Police contended that if the real perpetrators of the crime had been arrested
or identified, how were blasts still occurring in and around Mumbai? The
significance of the date of the attacks—6 December 1993—was not lost on
anyone.
*
After the arrest of Dr Ansari and the disclosures made by him, we in the
STF conducted simultaneous raids across the country in which fifteen other
associates were either arrested or identified. These operations were
conducted in close coordination with the local police of Lucknow and Rae
Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, the Dausa Police in Rajasthan and the Gulbarga
Police in Karnataka. During the investigation, evidence such as train
reservation forms, entries and signatures in hotel registers, eyewitness
accounts, confessions recorded under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities
(Prevention) Act (referred to as TADA), and explosive material and
weapons from the individuals accused were collected. A charge sheet was
filed in August 1994 in a TADA court in Ajmer. Earlier, all the bomb blast
cases had been clubbed together and were being investigated by us as a
single case. The trial of this case dragged on for nearly ten years and the
final court order came on 28 February 2004, convicting all accused and
sentencing them to life imprisonment.* O.P. Chhatwal, my SP in Delhi,
played a major role in marshalling the evidence, presenting it in court and
securing the convictions. The conviction of all fifteen accused individuals
with sentences to life imprisonment in a single case was a rare occurrence
in the history of the Indian police.
Dr Ansari and his co-conspirators are today in Ajmer Central Jail serving
their life sentences. On 6 April 2000, Azam Ghauri, one of the three
masterminds, was killed in an encounter with Hyderabad Police in Jagtiyal,
now in Telangana state. Seventeen years after the killing of Azam Ghauri,
the Delhi Police arrested the third mastermind, Abdul Karim Tunda, at the
Indo-Nepal border on 16 August 2017. He is currently lodged in Ajmer Jail
and is still undergoing trial in the serial train blast cases of 6 December
1993.
This was one of the major cases I was associated with during my nineyear
stint in the CBI. The unearthing of the countrywide network of a terror
group, whose existence was, until then, unknown to any state police force
or to any intelligence agency, has been a matter of great personal
satisfaction. Besides the resolution of the serial train blast cases, the
mystery behind over forty intermittent bomb blasts in and around Mumbai,
including the blasts at gurdwaras and police stations, was solved. A deadly
terror group had been identified and put away and scores of people saved
from deadly terror attacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment