For residents inside, there was no Eid celebration on Tuesday. Hamida Bewa (name changed on request), mother-in-law of Mukhtar Ahmed Sheikh, arrested for fraudulent dealings in SIM cards and possible Mumbai terror links, waits for her daughter to arrive from Ka-shmir and her son-in-law to be released. She knows for certain that Mukh-tar was a policeman and not a terrorist.

Hamida told The Indian Express: “ Mukhtar frequently visited Kolkata for official purposes. I know he is a policeman. Everybody here knows the same. He is not a terrorist. When he came to Kolkata in October, he told me that he has come for some official work of J&K Police. I am waiting for the Kashmir police to come here and bail him out.”

The Kolkata police, who claimed that Mukhtar had collected 32 SIM cards when he came to Kolkata in October, are now tight-lipped after the revelations of his connections with the J&K Police.

“We are awaiting a reply from J&K Police regarding his background. We have written to them on Monday with details of Mukhtar and his pictures. He has committed a crime of buying SIM cards illegaly,” said Rajiv Kumar, Special Additional Commissioner of Kolkata police and in-charge of the Special Task Force.

Hamida said: “Mukhtar, my daughter and their children were supposed to visit us for Eid. Now, look what has happened to this innocent man.”

“On the night of December 5, the police barged into my house and I was told that Mukhtar had been arrested. They asked for his belongings. I told them that there was none and he had returned to Kashmir long ago. The police then searched my room but found nothing. Next day, I called my daughter in Kashmir, who confirmed that she was also informed by J&K

Police that Mukhtar had been arrested by the Kolkata police in Delhi,” added Hamida.

Hamida said her family first came in touch with Mukhtar nearly 13 years ago, when he used to visit their locality to sell Kashmiri shawls. He fell in love with her younger daughter Mehnaz, who had just passed Class X then. “He looked like a nice man and proposed to my daughter,” said Hamida.

Mukhtar married Mehnaz in 1996 and lived in Kolkata for some time, before returning to Kashmir. “He told me that he had got a job in the Kashmir police. He used to talk about his senior officers. I went to Kashmir a couple of times and saw that he had friends in the police, who admired him,” she added.

Mukhtar frequently visited Kolkata in the last two years and said he was on some official work. In October, when he last came, he spent three days in this house.

“He used to go out for his police work in the day and return in the night. He had no visitors,” said Hamida.

Mehnaz is at present in Kashmir and will visit Kolkata soon. “My daughter is devastated. She will soon come here,” said Hamida. Her neighbours also confirmed that they knew Mukhtar as a policeman. “He was a soft spoken, mild-natured man,” said Muhammd Alauddin, neighbour of Hamida.