5-yr-old was kept in prison with framed mother

The case of Australian national Vivian Nehme, who was incarcerated for over three years on a trumped up charge, was sad, her defence lawyer Anil Lalla told DNA.

When the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested her at Mumbai airport on September 20, 2004, she was returning home with her five-year-old daughter after a holiday in Goa.

The NCB said Nehme was the “35/40-year-old European lady” who had booked five parcels containing hashish to the UK through PAFEX, Indian agents for FedEx, five months earlier.

The chargesheet described her as Austrian in disregard of her Australian passport showing residence in New South Wales. Nehme’s daughter was placed in the lockup with her until her grandmother arrived to take her back to Australia. The daughter has since lived with her grandmother.

Lalla said the airway bills were altered to match the identification on the impugned parcels. All the PAFEX staff said Nehme was not the woman who had booked the parcels.

The police panchas said the boxes and other material brought to court were not the same as those seized in April 2004.

“The case of Mohammad Siddique, Mohammad Ashraf, and Ayub Khan was worse,” said Lalla. A chemical analyser told the court that the material seized by the DRI was not heroin.

Moreover, their confessions, obviously recorded under duress, belied the facts in the complaint recorded by the DRI. “These three businessmen, who dealt in readymade garments, have lost their livelihood and suffered ignominy for someone else’s mistakes,” Lalla said.