The other suspects,Once charged,forever Changed

The unani practitioner is putting together resources and getting experts to support a legal aid NGO,Justice Legal Voice,to help prisoners wrongly booked.

In jail,he acquired a habit of eating his food hot. You waited a while and chapatis would turn hard. We had to eat it hot. The vegetables were never peeled. All this is against the jail rule book,and for crimes many had never committed, he says.

My wife and I were very busy doctors and had great plans for our three children. Today we have hardly any money to survive, he says. He has saved a print of an article on Dr Mohammed Haneef,compensated by the Australian government after being wrongly accused him of terrorism. He got compensated with several crores for 23 days of detention. We have lost five years,with no future, he says.

He was at his clinic in Govandi when the ATS picked him up on November 5,2006,he says. He was shown as arrested on December 6.

The ATS managed seven confessions out of the nine accused. Farsi was one of the two who refused to sign. I told them if I signed,I would be executed by the end of the trial. Why wait that long,I told them,kill me now, he says. They would blindfold me and beat me till I fell unconscious.

Farsi,paternal uncle to Noor-ul-Huda,says that in 2001,he had got a call from Kurla police who said Abu Mokatil was his alias. There was a poster with verses of the Quran pasted by a man named Abu Mokatil. I didnt know this man,nor were they my posters. I got branded that night. In police records,I became a fundamentalist.

He went on to study law in prison. He recalls preparing in 2010 a 300-page note on why he is not fit to be tried under MCOCA.

NOOR UL-HUDA,30

In 2001,a probe into a murder set the Nashik police looking for an accused named Abid Noor. They settled for Noor ul-Huda,then 16,since the name matched. The court discharged him since nothing else matched.

Put on the SIMI list,he has been under surveillance ever since. He is picked up in every preventive police exercise ahead of a festival or politicians visit. In August 2006,after one of his employers,Shabbir Masiullah was picked up in connection with the July 11 train blasts,the Ghatkopar crime branch picked him and tried to force him to accept responsibility for 7/11,he alleges. On October 10,the police picked him up again. He went on to spend five years in jail.

My life changed. I would be taken at night to the ATSs Kalachowkie office. They would beat me with a belt,a constable would sit on my tummy,my body would be held stiff with a rod, he says. I still wake up at night,my skull aching. Doctors have given up and just tell me not to think about it, he says.

Noor was shown as involved in case relating to a fake bomb found at a shopping complex,but says police wanted him to confess he was involved in the 2006 Malegaon bombings. He says he was taken to Archana Tyagi,additional CP,Bandra. I told her I am innocent. She asked me to sign the confession or face the wrath of the ATS, says Noor,who got bail in 2011.

This February,I got a loan and started a shop,but can no longer work long hours, he says. The ATS took away my dignity,my youth.

SHABBIR MASIULLAH,42

He is today an acupressure therapist. What inspired him,he says,was frequent dislocation of joints he suffered because of the torture he allegedly suffered during his five years in jail.

Among the visitors to his battery shop in Melagaon are elderly women with aching knees and young men with dislocated joints.

Masiullah was booked as one of the main conspirators of the 2006 Malegaon blasts. A month earlier,he had been picked up for the 7/11 train blasts,and was made an accused in the Malegaon case while in jail. ATS officials alleged he had visited Pakistan,and accused him of bringing RDX and making the bombs for the Malegaon attack at his godown.

In jail,he met an alleged cheque forger who also practised acupressure. Masiullah approached him to teach him these skills. He refused,saying it is necessary to know about the bodys pressure points, Masiullah said. The other prisoner left a month later.

With permission from the court and jail authorities,I got books on acupressure, Masiullah says. By the time he left,other prisoners had started calling him the doctor.

Since his release on bail in 2011,acupressure has been a parallel trade alongside his battery business. He charges Rs 50 for a 45-minute session. Today,even the man who was the main complainant in the blast case comes to me for treatment, he says.

RAEES AHMED,42

Through the five years that he spent in custody and in jail,he says,he broke down only once. He was made to strip naked with Noor ul-Huda,his employee. You earn a certain level of respect,an identity. Then,inside a dark room at the Kalachowkie ATS office,you are stripped of your rights,your dignity and your last piece of cloth, he says.

Till the police arrived on the night of October 23,2006,Raees was a father,a husband and a battery trader in partnership with his brother-in-law Shabbir Masiullah. Raees was just back from Saudi Arabia after 10 years as a tailor.

Shabbir had been picked up in August and the family was already in pain, he says. I had just completed my prayers and was about to begin my Ramzan fast. They wanted me to go with them for some inquiry,so I did. In the morning,he was shown as arrested.

While in custody,he says,the ATS men would keep beating me and ask me,Tell us why we have bought you here. What is it that you have done? He was eventually made to confess. I kept rolling the word confess in my tongue. I did not know English,till then it was just a word, says Raees,who learnt the meaning later.

Raees today runs a grocery store and is no longer in the battery trade. Shabbir and Raees,with Noor,had once dreamt of becoming the best battery traders in Malegaon.

Dr FAROGH IQBAL

MAKHDOOMI,40

On November 1,2006,five days before he was picked up,the surgeon had bought medicine supplies. Over the years,the store wrote it off as a bad debt. He settled it in April 2012.

It was a sum of Rs 679. It kept bothering me while I was in jail, says Makhdomi,who is very religious. Today,he spends much of his time making notes on all the policemen who stole my lifes peak period.

At his clinic is a red diary,with 2006 inscribed in golden letters. It constantly reminds me I have many years to catch up with, he says. The diary keeps records of patients and his accounts.

Medical stock worth Rs 15 lakh,bought in 2006,lies unusable in the clinics loft. Over the years,the familys savings have gone into jail visits and trips between Malegaon and Mumbai. A six-acre farm is under dispute after some people allegedly duped the family in his absence,and a few other properties had to be sold off. We are all doctors in the family. I had saved for two decades for a family clinic. It will remain a dream, he says.

In his bedroom are files with replies to 750 RTI applications that he filed from jail. Most are on law and crime. His latest application is on the upkeep of a garden in Malegaon. I am using all my time on this now.

In 2003,he had started a socio-economic survey on zakat,or charity. Police conveniently scribbled jihad in place of zakat. I have now taken detailed notes and used the RTI Act to prove everything, he says.

He has studied terror laws since his arrest. I will clear my name. But I want the courts and society to understand that there are specific sections in our terror laws that give unnecessary powers to police, he says. My story will not end with my discharge. I have a larger purpose now.

MOHAMMED ZAHID

ABDUL MAJEED,32

In 2006,the police picked up two brothers in separate terror cases,Zahid for the Malegaon blast and Javed,the younger,for the Aurangabad arms haul,both that year. Today,Zahid is out on bail and Javed remains in jail. Long before that,their father had disowned the elder son.

Ansari Abdul Majeed,58,recalls the night in December 1998 when a police officer asked him to take his elder son to the police station if he wanted his younger son released. I knew that neither of my sons was guilty,but if I had to give the police one boy,I preferred Zahid as he roamed with SIMI boys.

Boys were being picked up for communal posters and the police were preparing a SIMI list. A boy took Javeds name instead of Zahids, says the father,a teacher.

Zahid says his father thinks anything religious is SIMI. I cant fault him. I was never part of SIMI,but he feels it is because of me that my brother was booked.

In the last five years,the family has met Javed regularly in jail. I never saw them even once, Zahid says. Our father doesnt know,but Javed would share everything that came from home food,money. My father knows I was innocent in 1998,and even in this case. But he is angry,and I will have to wait, Zahid says.

The ATS charged Zahid with being a conspirator who knew of RDX being ferried to Malegaon.By booking me in a wrong case,they took away a fathers trust. But I believe I am out only because of his prayers. The father countered,I never prayed for him. He can live in that illusion.

Zahid,who used to be a preacher,relies on odd jobs. He has tried welding and opening a food stall. Nobody has a job for me. Even if a mosque gives me the job of a preacher,the local cops make it difficult for them.

Abrar Ahmed,39

A long drawing book he keeps has sketches of places in Nashik,Ujjain,Deolali,Indore and Mumbai. The forced approver says these are dubious places he was made to visit,escorted by police,in the three months after the blasts.

Abrar was shown as an approver who identified the rest of the accused. The evidence against him is a phone,which he says was given to him after the blast.

Abrar,then married,dealt in batteries. His wife has since divorced him and remarried. People started calling me an informer and a man who had cheated those of his faith. Even my wife and brother-in-law turned against me, he says.

He says that on the day of the blasts,he had heard some people take four Hindu names as the perpetrators. With his wife and brother-in-law,he went to SP Rajvardhan. I was given a phone and made to repeat some lines. These,I am told,were later shown as transcripts of a conversation between me and another accused,Zahid, he says.

At an Army camp in Deolali,he says,an officer named Colonel Prasad Purohit asked him to cooperate. It was a strange tour. Everywhere we were taken,I was photographed with strange people,always from the other community and always in religious attire, he recalls. At Ujjain,he says,he wasnt allowed to break his fast and was made to enter a temple.

They would take me around,bring me back to ATS and torture me,asking me to admit all the other photographs on the table were those of my co-conspirators. I didnt even know most of them, he says. There were days when Muslim brothers wouldnt talk to me in jail. Now things are changing. They have learnt I was duped,and I was not an approver, he says.

Still in jail,though not for Malegaon

Asif Bashir Khan,40

Just 10 when his father,a civil engineer,was picked up from their house in Jalgaon,Sajjad was not clear why. Asif Bashir Khan,granted bail in the Malegaon 2006 charges,remains in jail for the 7/11 case. He was charged with storing,supplying and distributing the RDX used in 7/11; the ATS claims the residue was used in Malegaon.

His son has just appeared for his Class X exams. I have seen the boy grow up with absolutely no enthusiasm, says Aziz,38,Asifs brother,also an engineer,who works with a private firm in Jalgaon. Aziz has been supporting his elder brothers family since the arrest.

Asif,a SIMI member once,had left the organisation. Two past cases relating to SIMI activities in Jalgaon were cited while charging him under MCOCA in the Malegaon blast.

His brother visits him in court but his children have not seen him in years. His two daughters are too young to understand, Aziz says.

With bail in the Malegaon case and the defence pointing out discrepancies in the 7/11 case,the family is hopeful. Even if it has taken six years,we are happy that the truth is finally coming out, Aziz said.

Shaikh Mohammad

Ali Alam Shaikh,37

His arrest led to his family being boycotted socially. His teenage daughter,eldest of four,then dropped out and is now struggling to complete her primary education.

Ammi made Didi stay home, says Shaikhs son,now 18.

Of the nine accused,seven were released on bail in 2011. Shaikh,a salesman with a medicine company,remains in custody for 7/11.

The ATSs case was that Shaikh knew Dr Salman Farsi,who too lived in Govandi. The ATS chargesheet says it was at Shaikhs house that conspiracy meetings were held. In May 2006,Shaikh had accompanied Farsi to Malegaon to attend the wedding of his nephew,Noor ul-Huda.

Shaikh and his three brothers lived together in a small house. The brothers now support the family,which also depends on the benevolence of relatives and well-wishers. My youngest son was three. We were hoping to give him the best education. Today his future is based on whatever help we can manage, his wife Saidunnisa said.