Two accused in the Aurangabad arms haul case, Mustafa Sayyed and Shaikh Abdul Naim, are slated to face separate trials. Sayyed alias Munna Mustafa, in 2008, had turned approver in the case, but in May 2012 he retracted the statement he gave before a magistrate and hence he will face a separate trial.
The trial of Naim alias Nayyu alias Sameer was separated because the police claimed that he had escaped from custody while being brought to Mumbai from West Bengal via the Howrah-Mumbai super-fast mail. Naim reportedly made his escape early in the morning when the train was between Kharsiya and Shakti railway stations in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district. Naim’s mother Qamar Nasreen Shaikh (60) filed a habeas corpus petition in the Bombay high court seeking her son before the court. She has sought a Central Bureau of Investigation probe in this matter. In her petition, it is said that she strongly suspects that her son was either killed in a police encounter or he was being illegally kept in custody so that he could be implicated in a false case. She has pointed out several loopholes in the police’s story to show that there are grounds to disbelieve the police’s story.
Some of the points raised by her are that three different escape timings were mentioned by three different government agencies. According to her, a letter forwarded by the Raigarh railway police to assistant commissioner of police ATS, Mumbai, shows the escape time to be 3.45 am, while the FIR says he ran away at 4.45 am and the message passed to all the police stations in adjacent areas of Raigarh show the escape timing as 7.45 am, on August 24. It is also said that despite the alleged incident taking place early in the morning, an FIR was registered only in the afternoon, at about 1.30 pm.
The petitioner also mentioned that even though there were five to six policemen escorting Naim and all of them got berths that were situated away from his seat, they had not handcuffed him. According to the petition, Naim was undergoing treatment for kidney disease and was very weak and if it is assumed that he had jumped from the train, why did the policemen not try to catch hold of him or attempt to stop the train by pulling the chain.
This petition is pending before the high court.
