Saiyed killed on main road at 7.45 am in front of police station; cops didn’t hear or see anything even as a crowd of 200 gathered at the spot.
Nadeem Saiyed, 38, a social worker known for his opposition to various illegal activities in Juhapura area of Ahmedabad, was hacked to death early on Saturday morning at the main Juhapura crossroads. The RTI activist, who was also an eyewitness in the Naroda Patia riots case, was stabbed 25 times with a butcher’s knife and axes.
Incidentally, the spot where he was murdered is barely 100 meters from the Juhapura police chowki but the police say they had no inkling of the savage attack. Sources say that a crowd of around 200 people had gathered when Saiyed was attacked and butchered but no one came forward to help him. The outspoken Saiyed is believed to have fallen victim to people involved in cow slaughter and other illegal activities. On Saturday morning, Saiyed left his house at Anwar society between 7.30 and 7.45am.
This was his daily routine. He used to have tea and browse through newspapers at a vendor's shop close to his house. The police said that, on Saturday, too, he was following his daily routine when four or five people suddenly appeared and stabbed him with axes and a butcher's knife. Saiyed was rushed to VS hospital by Ahsas Pathan, the newspaper vendor, but he was declared 'brought dead' by the doctors at the hospital. As Saiyed was a witness of the Naroda Patiya riots in which 95 people were killed during the communal violence on February 28, 2002, he was given special police protection. However, the policemen deployed for his protection were not escorting him at the time of the incident.
The gruesome murder has once again sparked off a controversy about policing in the state. Sayied was also suspected of being a police informer. He is believed to have informed senior police officers that the people who were arrested following a recent incident in which a police vehicle was torched while trying to rescue cows brought for slaughter in Juhapura, were not the real culprits.
Sources in the police claimed that Saiyed had also passed information to senior police officials that the real offender in the cow slaughter case was Md Sharif aka Kalu Gardan (Kalu the neck), a dreaded criminal of Juhapura. The sources said that someone in the police had leaked this information to Gardan who, incidentally, has acquired this nickname allegedly because he cuts of the necks of his victims.
However, Saiyed's father, Md Akbar Ali, 68, has lodged an FIR with the Vejalpur police in which he has blamed Firdos Mulla and Mushir Bachcha for his son's murder. He has stated in the FIR that Nadeem was murdered by contract killers hired by the duo. The case has been handed over to the crime branch which is believed to have picked up four people for questioning, including Firdos Mulla.
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