She says the phone was disconnected minutes after she made the plea.
Rupa Mody, whose son Azhar Mody went missing after the Gulbarg society massacre in 2002, told the fast-track court of Judge BU Joshi that she had phoned the then Ahmedabad police commissioner PC Pande for help.
“I phoned the city commissioner of police and told him that I, along with my two kids and hundreds of other people, had taken shelter at former Congress MP Ahesan Jafri’s house,” Mody said. She added that, minutes later, the phone was disconnected. Rupa Mody’s deposition and subsequent cross-examination took place in the fast-track court in the city on Monday and Tuesday.
Mody also told the court that when she saw a huge mob entering the Gulbarg society campus, she and another person, Imtiaz, had rushed to Jafri and asked him to save them. Jafri, who was talking on the phone at the time, told them later that he had called Narendra Modi and the CM had abused him.
She told the court that when she learnt that the CM had also refused to help, she phoned her brother-in-law, Farad, in desperation. But while she was still talking to Farad on the phone, the riotous mob which had reached Jafri’s house by then started pelting stones through the window. Mody said she had pleaded to the mob to spare her and her children as they were neither Hindu nor Muslim but Parsis. “But someone from the mob shouted:
‘You did not spare our mothers or children; so we, too will show you no mercy’,” she told the court. By then, the mob had attacked Aslam Khan Pathan and dragged him out of the house.
In an effort to save herself and her children, she put her hands out through the window of Jafri’s house and pleaded with the crowd to spare them. “When I put my hand out and asked for mercy, my son, Azhar, asked me not to put my hands out through the window as the crowd would do to her what it had done to ‘Aslam uncle’,” Mody said.
The crowd had now started throwing burning torches and stones inside Ahesan Jafri’s house. Mody told the court that in an effort to save others from the fury of the crowd, Jafri had even wanted to go out and face the mob, but he was stopped from doing that.
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