Rights activists have strongly criticised the presumptive nature of police investigations into the February 21 Hyderabad twin blasts.
The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association said Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde had linked the blasts to the executions of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru, and thereby “himself foreclosed the possibility of unbiased investigation.”
The JTSA questioned the Centre’s decision to involve the Hyderabad police in the probe into the Dilsukhnagar blasts, saying the force had a track record of biased investigation and had deliberately framed a dozen or so Muslim youths in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blasts.
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The organisation said despite this the police was on the same track and had once again picked up the same boys — Mohammad Rayeesuddin, Mohammad Azmath, Abdul Raheem and Abdul Kareem — for interrogation. All four were acquitted and had been recommended for cash compensation by the National Commission for Minorities.
The JTSA said: “The same Hyderabad Police which had, in the aftermath of the Mecca Masjid blasts, raided Muslim mohallas, rounded up scores of young men, tortured them at private farmhouses, alleged to have recovered RDX, arms and ammunition, jihadi literature, incriminating cellphone records and laptops, as well as records of journey to foreign countries for terror-training by these young men — all proven to be false now — have been entrusted with the investigation of the Dilsukhnagar blasts. Have we already forgotten that the additional metropolitan sessions judges in throwing out the two related cases of Mecca Masjid blasts found the police unable to produce any evidence except for the confessional statements of the accused – statements which had obviously been extracted under harsh and brutal torture, as attested by the Advocate Ravi Chander report.”
Further, “Why have the police officers, who indulged in and who supervised the frame-ups in the 2007 Mecca Masjid blasts, not been punished? Indeed, the Hyderabad blasts investigations demand that the policemen who deliberately tried to fabricate and derail a genuine probe the last time, be first punished. What is the guarantee that they will not influence the course of investigation of the recent twin blasts as well?”
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Meanwhile, Hyderabad-based lawyer Shafeea Rehman Mahajir, who had worked for the release of the Mecca Masjid blasts accused, has sent off an open letter to the police commissioner of Hyderabad, asking why local media houses were indulging in tendentious reporting quoting police sources, when he himself was on record that there were no clear leads on who was involved in the blasts. He said even the naming of a person as a suspect was enough to cause trauma to the suspect and his family.