The Bombay high court was recently informed that a special investigating team (SIT) has been constituted to trace Abdul Naeem Shaikh, an accused in Aurangabad arms haul case, who had allegedly escaped while on a train when jail staffers were bringing him to Mumbai from West Bengal to produce him before a MCOCA court. The court has asked the SIT to file a progress report in connection with the investigation done so far to trace the accused.
The division bench of Justice Ranjit More and Justice V.L. Achliya directed the SIT to file reply while hearing a Habeas Corpus petition filed by Shaikh’s mother, Qamar Nasreen (60).
During the hearing, the court was informed that recently an SIT that included the deputy superintendent of police has been constituted to trace Shaikh and also prize money of Rs 20,000 has been declared for the person who provides the whereabouts of Nasreen’s son. The government pleader requested the court to grant some more time to the SIT to make further efforts to trace the petitioner’s son.
On this, the bench asked the SIT to submit the status report of the investigation and the government has been asked to inform the court what action has been taken against those policemen who were escorting the petitioner’s son to Mumbai before the MCOCA court.
The police has claimed that a team of the West Bengal police was taking Shaikh under a production warrant via the Howrah-Mumbai Superfast mail. On August 24, 2014 when the said train was passing through Kharsiya and Shakti railway station in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district early in the morning Shaikh escaped from the train. However Nasreen in her petition has said she suspected that either her son had had an encounter with the police or he has been kept in illegal custody so that he could be implicated in another “false” case.
Her lawyer had pointed out several loopholes in the police story to show that there is material to disbelieve the police’s story. A few of the points raised by the petitioner are that three different timings of escape are mentioned by three different government agencies. According to her, a letter forwarded by the Raigarh railway police to the assistant commissioner of police ATS, Mumbai, shows the escape time as 3.45 am, while FIR says he ran away at 4.45 am and the message passed to all the police stations in adjacent areas of Raigarh show timing of escape as 7.45 am on August 24. It is also said that despite the alleged incident taking place in the early morning, an FIR was registered only in the afternoon, at about 1.30 pm.
Another question raised by Nasreen is that there were five to six policemen escorting him and all occupied a berth that was away from Shaikh’s seat but they still did not handcuff him. According to the petition, the accused was undergoing treatment for kidney disease and was very weak and if it is assumed that he had jumped from the train, why didn’t the policemen not try to catch hold of him or pull the chain
