‘I saw him stripped,chopped off and then burnt alive’

Her husband was dragged by the mob,which stripped him and chopped off his limbs before burning him,Zakia told the special fast-track court of Additional Sessions Judge B U Joshi.

Zakia said that on the day of the gruesome incident,many members of the Gulberg Society had taken shelter in their house since her husband was a former MP.

She also described the horror that she and other members of the Gulberg Society faced on February 28,2002,when they came under attack by a mob of over 3,000 people carrying weapons and sticks. Sixty-nine people were killed in the incident.

She said an angry mob broke the gate and wall of the society and started attacking people with swords and other weapons. Dead bodies of a number of people were scattered all over her house compound,she added.

Zakia said after the police arrived in the evening,she came down from the first floor of her house and saw in the verandah mutilated bodies of her neighbour Kasambhai’s wife and his pregnant daughter-in-law who was stabbed in the abdomen with a sword and the foetus had come out of the body.

Special Public Prosecutor,R C Kodekar,asked her how many people did police save on that day. Zakia replied there was no question of saving anybody since most of them were killed before the police arrived around 5 pm.

During cross-examination,defence lawyer Mitesh Amin asked Zakia if she could name one of the persons whose mutilated body she had seen in her compound. “Why don’t you ask about those who beheaded my husband,” Zakia asked Amin.