In a first, a senior serving police officer has spoken against the injustice meted out to youths implicated in terror cases on flimsy grounds and false charges
Two days after a Delhi court pulled up the investigating officers for a "shabby" probe in the 2005 Sarojini Nagar blast case, a senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer attached to the Union Home Ministry has slammed the Delhi Police for framing two Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) youths in the case.
Earlier, the court had acquitted three accused, including the J&K youths, in the case. The blast had claimed 67 lives and injured more than 200 people.
The 1987-batch IPS officer of Arunachal Pradesh-Goa-Mizoram and Union Territory (AGMUT) cadre, Satyendra Garg, slammed his colleagues in the Special Cell of Delhi Police for allegedly booking two J&K youths and raised questions regarding the prevailing policing and criminal justice system in the country.
This is for the first time that a senior serving police officer has spoken against the injustice meted out to youths implicated in terror cases on flimsy grounds and false charges. After spending 11 long years in Tihar jail, the two -- Mohammad Rafiq Shah and Mohammad Hussain Fazli -- were acquitted earlier this week by a Delhi court that ruled that the evidence against them was "fabricated and flimsy".
On his Facebook page on Sunday, Garg, Joint Secretary In-Charge of the north-east region, slammed the investigators in the blast case.
"If you are in jail for more than 11 years for a crime that the court finds you have not committed, you must be sick of the system. I try to imagine the mental states of the two persons arrested for the 2005 blasts, who spent 11 long years in jail, and then were cleared of all charges. One wonders what type of policing do we have... What type of criminal justice system where innocents can be made to spend as much as 11 years in jail," Garg said.
Rafiq was attending college in Kashmir on the day that the police claimed he planted a bomb in a Delhi bus, while Fazli, a shawl vendor in Srinagar, was arrested on the same day. Additional Sessions Judge Reetesh Singh, who set free three accused in the case, had also made scathing observations regarding Investigating Officer Sanjeev Kumar Yadav for his "lackadaisical attitude in investigating the role of accused Dar".
At present, Yadav is serving as the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Anti-Terror Unit, Special Cell, Delhi Police.
The Special Cell had filed a chargesheet against the three accused in 2008, stating that they planted bombs in Sarojini Nagar, Paharganj, and a bus in Kalkaji. The elite anti-terror investigating unit has been accused of bungling terror probes in the past. While the unit boasts of several successful operations, it has been pulled up by courts several times.
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