Cleared by POTA panel, blast accused gets bail

Fifteen months after he was arrested, Zaheer Ahmed Sheikh, who was accused of being one of the conspirators in the Ghatkopar blast, was granted bail today and will soon be cleared of all charges. The blast in a BEST bus at Ghatkopar on December 2, 2002 had left two persons dead and 34 injured. Sheikh was one of the four persons picked up from Parbhani in Maharashtra on December 27, 2002, paraded as the main accused, and booked under POTA. A special court granted bail to Sheikh for a sum of Rs 1 lakh after the Central POTA Review Committee on April 13 observed that there was no prima facie evidence against him and recommended that all cases against him be dropped. The prosecution’s case against Sheikh had been based on the confessions of two co-accused, Altaf Ahmed and Imran Rehman, besides certain calls made to him from the United Arab Emirates. At the POTA committee’s hearing, Sheikh’s lawyers argued that the confession merely mentioned that the three were friends. And the calls made from the UAE were from Khwaja Yunus, the accused who is missing from police custody. A computer owned by Sheikh and seized from a firm run by a friend and co-accused, Muzamil Jameel, was another piece of evidence presented against him. It was alleged that the computer had been used to produce subversive literature for SIMI.