Mohammad Aamir Khan’s 14 Lost Years

On a February night in 1998, Mohammad Aamir Khan, a resident of the Old Delhi area of India’s capital made his way to a chemist to buy medicine for a kidney stone problem. The deserted streets did not bother Mr. Khan, then 18, since he had lived in the neighborhood all his life and knew that there were likely to be very few people around at that time of the day.

He did not pay much attention to a white jeep that had been snaking its way up the road, following him at a distance, Mr. Khan recalled. Then he found himself being roughly pushed into the vehicle, and taken to a small room, where he said he was tortured and made to sign blank papers. It was only when he was brought to a court a week later did he realize that he was in police custody.

Mr. Khan was charged in 19 cases, for crimes including murder, terrorism and waing war against the nation. He was accused of masterminding 17 low-intensity bomb blasts that occurred in Delhi and neighboring states between December 1996 and December 1997.

But he was eventually acquitted in 17 cases, with two convictions pending appeal. When he was released last year, Mr. Khan had spent 14 years in jails in Delhi and nearby states as the trials worked their way through India’s criminal justice system.

“The prosecution has miserably failed to adduce any evidence to connect the accused appellant with the charges framed, much less prove them,” a Delhi High Court judgment said in overturning his conviction in one of the cases.

“I was just a normal teenage boy from a middle-class family,” Mr. Khan said. “To pick someone up just like that and torture them changes the course of their life.”
As the recent bombings in Hyderabad have renewed scrutiny of India’s intelligence agencies and the way they work with local police to investigate and prevent t! errorism, Mr. Khan’s case illustrates some of their failures.

Courtesy of Anhad Mohammad Aamir Khan at a protest in Delhi against the targeting of Muslim youth in terrorism cases, in this June 14, 2012, photo.

The Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad in 2007, the last major incident of terrorism in Andhra Pradesh before the bombings in late February, has yet to see the successful sentencing of the accused.

The first investigation into the blast, in which at least nine people were killed, became a cause for some embarrassment for the local police, who initiall attributed responsibility to radical Muslim organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkatul-ul-Jihad-e-Islami. A subsequent investigation by the National Investigation Agency pointed to the involvement of Hindu right-wing organizations, noting that the bombing targeted a mosque. The case is currently being “reinvestigated,” according to the Home Ministry.

Eighteen Muslim men who were charged by the local police following the blast ended up being acquitted in 2008. The state government announced a compensation of 300,000 rupees ($5,500) for 15 of those men.

Human rights activists say that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases like Mr. Khan’s, in which an innocent person was! jailed f! or years, only to be acquitted later, while the actual criminals are often never caught.

“It is unfortunate that there is no specific law to compensate acquitted people in our country, or a provision to punish the authorities responsible for the injustice,” said Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer and social activist.

Some civil rights activists also allege that Muslim youths in particular are being targeted and unjustly detained in terrorism cases.

“In the whole fight against terrorism, what they have done is to specially target and demonize the minorities, demonize the Muslims,” said Shabnam Hashmi, a People’s Union for Civil Liberties member who runs Act Now for Harmony and Democracy, the non-government organization where Mr. Khan now works.

There is no consolidated data on the religious affiliations of those arrested in terrorism cases, but there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence of bias against Muslims, the Jamia Teacher’s Solidarity Association, a civil rights group o university teachers based in Delhi, said. It released a report last year documenting 16 such cases involving the Delhi Police’s Special Cell, which deals with terrorism.

Mr. Khan was “lucky to have been released at all,” said Feroz Khan Ghazi, a lawyer who represented Mr. Khan in several cases. “Many others are not so lucky.”

Mohammad Shakeel, who was accused of conspiring with Mr. Khan in many of the cases, was found hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell in 2009, after being apprehended in 1998. The jail superintendent at that time, V.K. Singh, was charged with his murder and is now on trial. Mr. Shakeel was also acquitted in a majority of the cases registered against him, including 17 cases in Delhi, his lawyer, Mobin Akhtar, said in a phone interview.

“There are two types of acquittals,” Mr. Ghazi said. First, “where there is insufficie! nt eviden! ce to convict a person and second, where the police framed a person, which is what we believe happened with Mr. Khan.”

“Such cases happen because there is a great deal of pressure on the police and investigating agencies to produce results,” Mr. Ghazi continued. “But making scapegoats of innocent people means the real culprits have escaped.”

For its part, the central government has denied that it has deliberately singled out Muslims after a terrorist attack. “The law does not discriminate on the basis of color or religion,” said the home minister, R.P.N. Singh, after the issue was raised in Parliament during the current session.

It is extremely unfortunate if some youths were in jail without any charge sheet filed against them, he added.

As for Mr. Khan, Arvind Ray, principal secretary (home) in the Delhi government, denied that he had been improperly detained for years. Mr. Ray told India Ink that the police believe that Mr. Khan is a terrorist who is free only becausethey were not able to gather enough evidence.

A year after his release, Mr. Khan is still fighting to be awarded compensation for being wrongfully detained, and it appears he will have to fight for some time. “We do have a victim compensation act, but it does not cover Mohammad Aamir Khan’s case since he is not the victim of any crime,” Mr. Ray said.

Abu Zafar contributed reporting from New Delhi