Thirteen years after he was allegedly killed in police custody and nine months after the appointment of a special public prosecutor, the trial of 27-year-old software engineer Sayed Khwaja Yunus Sayed Ayub, also remembered as Khwaja Yunus, has still not started and was adjourned yet again for another month.
The trial was scheduled to commence on August 21 against four police officials, Assistant Police Inspector Sachin Vaze and three policemen, Rajendra Tiwari, Rajaram Nikam and Sunil Desai who are charged with conspiracy, destruction of evidence and murder.
But the trial has been adjourned again because the witnesses in the case were not summoned. Talking to The Hindu, special public prosecutor Dhiraj Mirajkar said, “The hearing was adjourned as summons are required to be served upon the witnesses. Witnesses will have to be traced from Ghatkopar and Aurangabad. The next hearing is placed on September 21.” Mr Mirajkar is the third Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) in the case who was notified in November 2015. Yunus is believed to have died due to third degree torture administered on him in the crime branch’s Ghatkopar unit. He was also punched in the stomach and died due to vomiting blood.
Yunus’s mother Aasiya Begum who ran from pillar to post for the appointment of an SPP to expedite the trial, said, “If only I was shown my son’s face and given a chance to bury him by performing all the last rites, I would have never approached the court.” In an emotionally charged voice, she said, “My husband died soon after it was declared that Yunus is dead. So many innocent kids are picked up by the police and then they never return. The police officers have to be prosecuted so that a message goes out in society.”
Yunus worked in Dubai as a software engineer and was visiting his family in India in December 2002. He was holidaying in his hometown in Parbhani, when a bomb ripped through a BEST bus in Ghatkopar in Mumbai, killing two and injuring over 50 people. He was picked up by the Ghatkopar police and was remanded to police custody under the now-repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act in January 2003.
In their statements, witnesses said Yunus vomited blood for three days and then died in custody. The police have maintained that he ran away when he was being taken from Mumbai to Aurangabad in a jeep.
Yunus’s sister-in-law Zeba Siddique said, “One has to apply their mind on how it is even possible that a boy who was away from the city when the blasts took place planned and executed it and was so easily apprehended by the police.” She also said, “There have been no arrests in the murder of rationalists Govind Pansare and Narendra Dhabolkar but arrests were being made right after a bomb blast in the city. How did the police act so fast? And why will an engineer who has worked so hard to get a job in a German-based company plan a blast?
Meanwhile, the accused have been moving applications to delay the trial and the last one stated that the murder charge cannot be invoked against them as the prosecution has failed to prove it. Yunus is among the 106 prisoners who died in police custody over the last 15 years in Maharashtra.
