I still vividly remember my first — and only — meeting with Yakub Memon 13 years ago. Dressed in a crushed shirt and burgundy shalwar, he was cowering on the floor in a small room at the CBI headquarters in New Delhi. The handsome, bearded chartered accountant looked terribly anxious and uncertain, not unlike many criminals I had seen in police custody during a long career as a journalist.

My instinctive thought was: he’s cracking under third-degree. But it was not long before I discovered the real reason behind Yakub’s tormented look that day. He wasn’t suffering under torture. He was just very apprehensive. And the anxiety was due to the fact that he had landed in CBI custody as a direct result of an incredible leap of faith and conviction taken by him and his family, something that hasn’t been fully chronicled yet and something, sadly, that was cruelly negated by the death sentence passed against him last week by Judge P.D. Kode.

I am aware that many readers will be outraged by my view of what’s befallen Yakub and the other Memons. Kode is a national hero today, and some of the 100 convictions handed out by the judge in the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings case — such as acquitting actor Sanjay Dutt on the terror charge but sentencing him for possessing illegal weapons — are beyond reproach.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying that ever since the sensational return of the Memons from Pakistan in three different batches in mid-1994, barely 17 months after the bombings, the family has come in for special treatment. Death for Yakub and life imprisonment for his two younger brothers Essa and Yousuf and sister-in-law Rubina only appear to fit the pattern.

... contd.