Who will return 12 years of these 10 Muslims wrongly accused of terrorism?

HYDERABAD: T Srinivas Rao, judge of the seventh additional metropolitan sessions court on Thursday exonerated the innocent Muslims who were jailed for more than a decade in the 2005 Hyderabad police’s Task Force office case reported Janta Ka Reporter.

A court acquitted 10 Muslims for lack of evidence in a Begumpet TF office bomb blast case nearly 12 years ago.

“The court made it clear that there was no evidence against the accused to link them to the crime,” lawyers Azeem and Khaled told mediapersons at the court.

A Bangladeshi bomber had walked into the Begumpet STF office located in Greenlands area here on October 12, 2005 and detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), killing the home guard A Satyanarayana, 51, and himself. A special investigation team (SIT) of the Central Crime Station conducted an inquiry and it claimed Harkatul Jihad-e-Islami (HUJI) of Bangladesh was involved in the blast.

The investigating team later filed a charge sheet in 2006 under sections 302, 307 r/w 120-B of the IPC and named a total of 20 persons in it. The SIT arrested 10 persons and claimed that three other accused died in different incidents and the remaining seven were absconding.

Among the 10 Muslims acquitted, five were from Hyderabad city , three from Bidar and the remaining two belonged to West Bengal and Bangladesh.

All the 10 acquitted includes:

  1. Md Abdul Kaleem, 25, a welder from LB Nagar.
  2. Md Abdul Zahed, 20, brother of a key conspirator, Shahed Bilal of Moosarambagh.
  3. Md Shakeel Ahmed, 40, a mechanic from Laad Bazar.
  4. Syed Haji, 22, a book salesman from Moosarambagh.
  5. Md Abdul Khaja alias Amjad from Moosarambagh.
  6. Ajmal Ali Khan, 45, a farmer from Bidar, Karnatka.
  7. Syed Azmath Ali, 35, from Bidar, Karnatka and
  8. Md Mahmood Baroodwala, 45, from Bidar, Karnatka.
  9. Nafeequl Biswas, 26, a grocery store owner from Murshidabad district of Bengal
  10. Md Hilaluddin, 22, a B Com student from Rajshahi district of Bangladesh

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Zahid, now 33, has lost precious years in prison and underwent a traumatic 12 years. His  lives have been destroyed.

Mohammed Kaleem also went through a similar ordeal. Kaleem’s arrest in 2005 broke the whole family.

Married a month ago to the love of his life, Kaleem had to leave his newly wed wife telling her to marry again to someone else.

There have been several instances of Muslims being wrongly implicated in terror related charges in the past.

Cooked up and false charges were slapped on them and were detained  years for the  crime they never committed

In some cases, the innocent Muslims suffered economically, emotionally, physically and psychologically for years.

The recent developments related to the acquittal of innocent Muslims have also brought the efficiency of the judiciary under spotlight.

However, the emotional and psychological trauma they underwent all through these years cannot be compensated.

Will the government award compensation to those innocent falsely implicated in terror-related cases?

(With PTI inputs)