BOMBAY, 28 October 2006 — The Anti Terrorist Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra police received a major setback after two accused Sajid Ansari and Abdul Wahiduddin told Judge Mridula Bhatkar of the special Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) that they were forced to sign confessional statements. Both accused were arrested in the July serial train blast case.
Earlier, six other accused had retracted their statements, and with the two latest retractions the ATS are now left with only three out of the 11 confessional statements recorded by it.
Ansari told the judge that his statement was recorded, but the Deputy Commissioner of Police Sanjay Mohite, who recorded his statement, did not allow him to read the statement before he signed it.
Wahiduddin too told the judge that his signature was taken twice on the documents, the contents of which were not known to him. Wahiuddin had been accused of harboring Pakistani terrorists in Bombay and organizing their escape. Ansari has been accused of actively participating in assembling of bombs used in the blasts.
It was Ansari's mother, who two days ago, filed an application in the MCOCA court alleging that her son was tortured by the police and she saw injury marks on Ansari's hands and below his eyes when he was brought to the house for a search by the police. The judge ordered a medical examination of Ansari by a government doctor under the supervision of their family doctor. The report of their findings will be produced in court on Nov. 1.
Defense lawyer Amin Solkar explained that if a person is made to sign on a document and not allowed to read it, it can be said that the statement is made involuntarily, and if this is proved in court, the confession would not hold.
ATS lawyer Raja Thackeray and ATS chief K.P. Raghuvanshi too made contradictory statements. After Ansari and Wahiduddin retracted their statements, Thackeray told the court that the statements of six others, produced in the court earlier, had not been taken. But this contradicted the statement made by Raghuvanshi, who had told the media that the confessions had been recorded.
Dismissing the defense allegations, Raghuvanshi said that the MCOCA procedures were followed while recording the statements, and that the investigations were carried out as per the guidelines prescribed under MCOCA, that proper procedures were followed. Raghuvanshi denied the allegations of torture in custody and said that not a single accused in their custody had complained to the court of police torture.
In another development, the transfer orders of 16 cops including encounter specialists made by the state Director General of Police P.S. Pasricha, following the directions of the Bombay High Court in connection with the disappearance of Khawaja Yunus, may be reversed. None of those transferred are willing to move out of Bombay and had made a representation to the state Home Minister R.R. Patil stating that there was not enough evidence against them and that they were neither arrested or suspended in the case.
Pasricha said that so far he had not reversed the orders, but he could reconsider them only on the condition that the state CID had no issues. Pasricha said "If the officers feel aggrieved and wish to approach the court or the higher authority, I do not have any problem. And if tomorrow the Additional Director General of Police (CID) Jayant Umranikar writes to me that some of these officers are out of the zone of suspicion, I do not have any problem in reconsidering my orders" Pasricha said.
