AHMEDABAD, India — The tableau was as improbable as it was grisly. The bullet-riddled bodies of four Muslims lay neatly lined up in the middle of a road. One of the dead cradled a machine gun. Bomb-making chemicals and a suitcase full of cash sat in the trunk of their car. Intelligence reports had identified [...]
The Gujarat government on Tuesday maintained that Mumbai collegian Ishrat Jahan and three of her friends killed in a 2004 shootout were terrorists and said it would challenge a report of a metropolitan magistrate that said the police shot them in cold blood. A day after the report by Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S P Tamang [...]
Five years after she was gunned down as an alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist, Gujarat High Court has ordered a probe that would establish if indeed Ishrat Jahan was a fidayeen or simply a college student felled by trigger-happy policemen. The court has set up a three-member committee of senior IPS officers to investigate afresh the June 2004 killing [...]
The Gujarat high court on Thursday set up a three-member team comprising senior police officers of the state to investigate the Ishrat Jahan encounter case. The team, consisting of additional DGP Pramod Kumar, IG Mohan Jha and DIG JK Bhatt, has been asked to submit its report within three months. Ishrat Jahan, a student from Mumbai, [...]
LETTER TO THE EDITOR To, 5.6.2009 The Editor, Times of India, Fadia Chambers, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad. Sir, I am enclosing a response to the Edit page article “A change of Priorities” {TOI, Ahmedabad, 4.6.2009}. Please publish and oblige. Yours sincerely, Mukul Sinha [...]
High Court registry receives SC order on special courts The Gujarat High Court, as per the directions of the Supreme Court, will soon initiate the process of setting up six fast-track courts for the trial of the 2002 riot cases. A High Court official said that the HC registry received the apex court’s order on [...]
Stavan Desai and Sweta Ramanujan-Dixit , Hindustan TimesFebruary 23, 2009 Fighting for Justice Mukhtar Muhammad, 41 Footwear wholesaler When Mukhtar Muhammad drove his Tata Sumo through a burning mass of rubble and loot from shops in Panchmahal district to escape a murderous mob of rioters on February 28, 2002, he did not know he would [...]
The Double Helix of Violence (Mukul Sinha) 8.12.2008 THE FIRST HELIX The arrest of Pragya Singh Thakur by the Mumbai ATS Chief Hemant Karkare for the 29thSeptember,2008 Malegaon bomb blast had cracked the very foundation of the propaganda regarding “islamic terrorism” that the Hindu rightist forces were building [...]
INDIA IN A CENTRIFUGE (The Secular Nation in Danger) (Mukul Sinha) INDIA perhaps is now going through the most severe socio-political crisis in the post Independence period. Never before has the moral and intellectual content of the Nation dipped so low. Never before has the Nation been so deeply inflicted by corruption, communalism [...]
There may be many a slip before the Gujarat Control of Organised Crime (Gujcoc) (Amended) Bill, 2003, passed in the State Assembly on Wednesday, becomes an Act, especially with the new government at the Centre promising to repeal Pota. Framed on the lines of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), 1999, it may [...]
