Huji man in Lucknow,Kolkata at the same time?

From Kolkata,Ajijur was brought to Lucknow on June 28,2007,and has been in Lucknow jail since. The police claim they had recovered the explosives which Ajijur and two other men had hidden in the city.

According to the case diary,submitted by the UP police in court,Ajijur,Mohammad Ali Akbar Hussain and Sheikh Mukhtar Hussain had come to Lucknow with Babu Bhai on June 22,2007.

Babu Bhai had asked them to wait at the Charbagh Railway Station and left,only to be caught by the police.

According to the Lucknow police,while waiting for Babu Bhai at the Charbagh Railway Station,the three men got to know of his arrest while watching TV at a tea stall. They went to a place near the SGPGI in Mohanlalganj,buried the 10 hand grenades,10 detonators and nine rods of explosives at a construction site and returned to West Bengal via Allahabad.

The UP Police claimed that they arrested the three HuJI activists from West Bengal with the help of the local police,brought them here,recovered the explosives they had hidden near SGPGI,and then booked them under the Explosives Act and the Unlawful Activities Act.

The authorities in West Bengal have a account to relate. Swarup Kumar Saha of Special Operations Group,CID,West Bengal,said: “We arrested Ajijur near his house in Biramnagar (in the 24 North Parganas) on June 22,2007. He was sent to judicial custody. Later,the Uttar Pradesh police came with a production warrant against him and took him away.”

On September 8,2008,the UP police filed the chargesheet against the three men including Ajijur. The case diary mentions that during interrogation,Ajijur told the police that his elder brother Shahjahan alias Mirzabar was staying in Bangladesh and that he knew Asif Raza — the main accused in the Partho Roy Burman kidnapping case in Kolkata — who died in the hands of the Gujarat Police in 2001.

Ajijur also told the police that he collected the money and items which his brother sent for HuJI operatives in India,and handed these over to Babu Bhai. The record adds that Ajijur had that confessed he knew Babu Bhai for long.

No Uttar Pradesh police officer,including the SSP of the Special Task Force Amitabh Yash and the DIG of Anti-Terror Squad Rajiv Krishna commented on the discrepancy in the stories of the Lucknow police and the Bengal police.

Investigating Officer of the case,Dy SP Ram Nayan Singh said,“After Babu Bhai’s arrest,we passed on the information to the West Bengal police who caught them and later went and brought them here on transit remand.”

But he has no explanation as to how Ajijur could be present in Lucknow at the same time that he was lodged in a jail in Kolkata. His lawyer Mohammad Shoaib says the facts clearly show that his client had been falsely implicated in the case.

“If someone is present in Kolkata,how can he be in Lucknow at the same time? Moreover,nothing objectionable was recovered from his possession at the time of arrest,” added Shoaib.

For the record

In December 2007,the UP police arrested 26-year-old Aftab Alam Ansari,an employee of Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation Limited,for his alleged involvement in the serial blasts that rocked the civil courts in UP on November 23,2007. For 18 days,the police questioned him,but found no evidence. Finally,he was released on January 16. STF officials had then claimed that they arrested Ansari after he was named by two HuJI operatives,Mohammad Khalid and Tariq Qazmi,who were allegedly involved in the blasts.

ENS