The other encounter

Investigations by the CBI have now revealed that Sadiq was apprehended by officers of the Maharashtra unit of the Intelligence Bureau (Mumbai SIB) and the Crime Intelligence Unit of the Mumbai Police,handed over to the Gujarat Police,profiled as a terrorist,and then killed in a fake encounter. The probe also found that Sadiq had been shot at very close range in the head,which debunked the Ahmedabad Crime Branch theory that they had shot him in self-defence.

In December 2012,the CBI filed a chargesheet naming eight Gujarat policemen and annexed statements of intelligence officers and Gujarat police officers to disprove the theory that he was a terrorist on a mission to kill.

The CBI has two testimonies—one by Ambady Gopinathan of the State Intelligence Bureau,Mumbai,and the other by then Bhavnagar superintendent of police Anupam Singh Gehlot—that say that the so-called intelligence input that Sadiq Jamal was out to kill right-wing Hindu leaders was without basis.

***

A narrow,steep,wooden staircase leads up to the first floor of a 100-year-old building in the Kala Nala area of Bhavnagar city in Gujarat. It was here,in a 15×12 ft room,that Sadiq and Shabbir grew up. Shabbir now lives here with his wife and children and his father Jamal Mehtar. The senior Mehtar is 70,drives a taxi and ever since his wife died in 1986 of a stove burst,has rarely been home,usually travelling outside the state.

Sadiq,who studied till Class VII,rode an autorickshaw while he was in Bhavnagar,while Shabbir,who dropped out of school after Class IX and is five years younger to Sadiq,earns a living repairing two-wheelers.

Shabbir shows the street outside their home where Sadiq,while playing cricket,hit the ball into a chemist’s shop in 1996. The chemist,Rajesh Dani,filed a criminal case against him. That’s when the police first came looking for Sadiq. “My father scolded Sadiq and he left the house,never to return again,” says Shabbir. The next he heard of Sadiq was six years later,on November 9,2002,when he was booked in a gambling case. “But neither did I find him then nor did he come home,” says Shabbir.

However,from then on,the Bhavnagar police began visiting them frequently,questioning them about Sadiq and his antecedents. “They told us his name was Ayyub Islam. We denied that and said we called him ‘Sada’ at home,” says Shabbir. The police even searched their place but found nothing. They took away an old photograph of Sadiq as a teenager.

On January 12,2003,Shabbir got married and the following day,the family was at Gadhada in Bhavnagar for his brother-in-law’s wedding when they got news of Sadiq’s encounter. The police asked them to go to Ahmedabad and claim his body. Afraid that they would be detained for ‘terror links’,they did not go till a police jeep from the Ahmedabad Crime Branch came to their home in Bhavnagar a couple of days later.

Shabbir told the CBI,“DG Vanzara (then DCP-Crime) told my father that whatever had to happen has happened. He said,‘Iski dead body le kar jaao aur koi complaint karne ki koshish mat karna nahin to tumhare is ladke ka haal bhi Sadiq jaisa ho jayega (Take his body and don’t try to lodge a complaint or else your other son will face the same fate as Sadiq’s).’”

The Mehtars decided not to bring his body back to Bhavnagar. “It was so soon after the 2002 riots. We live in a mixed,harmonious neighbourhood,but had we got the body here,riots would surely have broken out on the pretext that we were burying a terrorist’s body. So we did the burial rituals in Ahmedabad,” says Shabbir.

He recalls how Sadiq was always clean shaven,but when they saw his body,“he had grown a beard and moustache and there were marks on his thigh indicating custodial torture”.

For two years after that,the family lived with the “terror” tag. “Nobody came to repair scooters in my shop,neighbours shunned us,and I became the ‘terrorist’s brother’,” says Shabbir.

***

The CBI probe shows that Sadiq left for Mumbai in 1996-97 after the fracas with his father and worked as a domestic help at the home of Tariq Parveen,an associate of Dawood Ibrahim. In 2000,Parveen shifted to Dubai and called Sadiq over in 2002. But in October 2002,Sadiq had an altercation with Parveen’s associate,Pakistan-based gangster Salim Chiplun,and was sent back to India.

Asif Mubarak,one of Parveen’s employees,told the CBI that after the fight with Chiplun,Sadiq ran away to the police station after which he was deported to India around October 2002.

The CBI chargesheet says,“After Sadiq’s return to India,an input was generated by the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB),Mumbai,that Sadiq Jamal was a D-gang member and arrived from Dubai with an intention to kill certain right-wing Hindu leaders”.

On November 9,2002,Sadiq was arrested with five others in a gambling case registered at ‘A’ division police station of Bhavnagar,the same police station where he faced the cricket violence charge,but was released on bail.

Fearing arrest by the Bhavnagar police who had started searching his home and questioning his family,Sadiq returned to Mumbai and sought help from Ahmad Abdul Karim alias Zahid,the older brother of Tariq Parveen. On July 21,2012,Zahid told the magistrate at 19th court,Esplanade,Mumbai,that he took Sadiq to “Guru Sir” (Gururaj Savadatti),then an intelligence officer of the Maharashtra unit of the IB.

On the IB officer’s advice (the CBI chargesheet does not name Savadatti here),Zahid took Sadiq to Andheri near the Mumbai Crime branch CIU where,“in a stage managed joint operation” of SIB Mumbai and CIU,Andheri,Sadiq Jamal was arrested on December 19,2002,from a place near Arsa Hotel,Andheri (East),Mumbai. “At the CIU,Sadiq was subjected to interrogation,” the CBI chargesheet says.

On January 2,2003,Tarun Barot,then police inspector of Ahmedabad Crime Branch,and his staff left for Mumbai. The next day,they took Sadiq from the custody of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch. He was then illegally confined at Bungalow No 15 of the Crime Branch office in Shahibaug,Ahmedabad. On January 12,2003,days before Gujarat’s popular kite-flying festival Uttarayan,Sadiq was taken in a Tempo Traveller to the Sai Baba Complex near Galaxy cinema in Naroda where he was shot dead around 1.15 am. Of the 11 rounds fired by the encounter team,five to six rounds were fired from the service revolvers of police inspectors JG Parmar and IA Saiyed. A .32” bore gun and ammunition were allegedly planted on Sadiq’s body.

What the CBI hasn’t established is how Sadiq was handed over from the Mumbai Crime Branch to the Gujarat Police. Shabbir says a small-time Mumbai journalist Ketan Tirodkar,who was arrested in the case by the CBI and is now out on bail,told him that it was encounter specialist Daya Nayak of the Mumbai ATS who handed him over to the Gujarat Police. Tirodkar is known to be close to Daya Nayak.

“In 2004,Ketan Tirodkar sent my father a bus ticket to Mumbai by Tanna Travels,saying it was in connection with Sadiq. I told my father that I would go with him,riding with the driver,so that nobody suspects we are together. We met Ketan Tirodkar who told us how Sadiq had approached him to use his police connections to get out of the Bhavnagar gambling case,how he had taken Sadiq to Daya Nayak who betrayed him and handed him over to the Gujarat Police to be killed,” says Shabbir.

The CBI arrested Tirodkar in July 2012 but he got out on bail after the agency failed to file the chargesheet within 90 days of his arrest. CBI officers,while refusing to divulge information on Tirodkar’s status in the case,say that “this will be cleared in the supplementary chargesheet.”

Shabbir’s lawyer Mukul Sinha,who is also representing Gopinath Pillai,father of Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai in the Ishrat case,says,“The entire pattern,motive,planning and conspiracy in both the cases (Sadiq and Ishrat) were done by the same group of people with the same political motive. In fact,IB officers are involved in the Sadiq case too,as much as they are in the Ishrat case.”

***

In his sparsely done up home,Shabbir prepares to return to his garage after lunch. “I want the policemen punished while they are still in the job. Who wants to see them in jail when they are old and have no punch left?”

THE CASE FILE

January 12-13,2003: Sadiq Jamal Mehtar killed in police encounter

2007: Sadiq’s brother Shabbir moves Gujarat High Court

June 16,2011: High Court asks for FIR to be registered

June 20,2011: Crime Branch,Ahmedabad,registers FIR against “the then police officers of Gujarat and Maharashtra state and others”

July 7,2011: CBI

takes over case

December 21,2012: CBI files first chargesheet against eight Gujarat policemen—Tarun Barot (suspended DSP),J G Parmar (retired DSP),I A Saiyed (retired DSP),K M Vaghela (retired DSP),R L Mavani (inspector),G H Gohil (inspector),and constables Ajaypalsingh Siyaram Yadav and Chhtrasinh Manubha Chudasama. All of them except Saiyed and Vaghela have been arrested

Two testimonies,two clean chits

Ambady Gopinathan,then Deputy Central Intelligence Officer with the IB’s Maharashtra wing,told the CBI that his junior officer,Gururaj Savadatti,had submitted a ‘source report’ in the last week of October 2002,saying Sadiq was a D-gang member out to kill right-wing Hindu leaders and that he was doing a recce in Ahmedabad. SIB officers Savadatti,Praveen Ladhani and RR Aigal were sent to Ahmedabad and Bhavnagar to watch Sadiq but they got nothing concrete against him. The SIB then came to a conclusion that the intelligence input was not true.

Gopinathan told the CBI that Savadatti later told him about Sadiq’s presence in Mumbai and a team of SOG officers was deputed to apprehend him. Gopinathan says in his statement,“On the basis of interrogation,it was concluded by SIB,Mumbai,that there was no substance in the input that Sadiq had intention to cause any harm to VVIPs as alleged in the initial source report. The interrogation report containing the conclusion of interrogating officers of SOG was forwarded to IB HQ,New Delhi.”

The other testimony is of Anupam Singh Gehlot,then Bhavnagar superintendent of police,who told the CBI that on November 29,2002,Rajinder Kumar,then Joint Director with the Gujarat unit of the IB,called him and told him to look for one Ayyub Islam at Rafique Garage in Kala Nala,who was “about to proceed towards Mumbai” and might be carrying weapons. The then ADGP (intelligence) J Mahapatra also called Gehlot asking him to act on Kumar’s input. Gehlot’s men enquired about Ayyub Islam,but found nothing.

Two-three hours later,Kumar and Mahapatra called Gehlot again and gave the name of Sadiq Jamal Mehtar of Kala Nala,describing him as a “trained militant having links with Lashkar-e-Toiba who had come to Gujarat to kill Shri Narendra Modi and Shri Pravin Togadia”.

Gehlot told CBI that during those telephone conversations with Kumar and Mahapatra,he sensed that Kumar was keen on detaining Sadiq whereas Mahapatra wanted him to “verify the facts as stated by Kumar and report back to him”.

Gehlot got Sadiq’s antecedents checked and reported back that except for the two criminal cases (cricket fight and gambling),Sadiq was neither involved in nor wanted in any case in Bhavnagar. Gehlot described these cases as “petty” in nature.