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But for the fact that it is less than an hour’s road journey from the historic Hindu shrine at Tirupati, Puttur in Andhra Pradesh is a forgettable dusty town one drives through in minutes on the way from one city to another without even noticing it. Earlier this month, however, national news networks stopped over there after the police arrested two terrorists reportedly on the run for years and hiding lately in this sleepy town of 55,000 residents.
Since their arrests on 5 October after a nightlong siege of their rundown rented house in Puttur, Bilal Malik, 25, and Panna Ismail, 38, are said to have confessed to murdering local BJP leaders in neighbouring Tamil Nadu as well as to planting bombs two years ago in a failed bid to assassinate BJP leader LK Advani. The police said the duo have been members of an Islamic terror group named Al Ummah.
But, as with most police narratives about terrorists, the story of Puttur’s fugitives throws up too many contradictions when held up to scrutiny. Over the past two weeks, TEHELKA has investigated police claims of the antecedents of the men (along with that of a third who was arrested in Chennai a day before their arrest), examined the previous terror cases against them, met their families, and visited Puttur to verify the events of the arrest.
First, the story of their dramatic arrests. Just after midnight following 4 October, the police quietly began to evacuate hundreds of residents from a low-income locality in Puttur. After all houses but one had emptied out, the police surrounded it and challenged its occupants to give themselves up. But, according to the police, the men inside attacked them leading to an “encounter” in which Ismail was shot. Malik’s wife sustained a gash on her face. Because no one saw the alleged encounter, there are no independent witnesses.
The police claimed that Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, an absconding terrorist they arrested on 4 October, led them to the duo at Puttur. Explosives, bombs and a pistol were also reportedly recovered from a locked house nearby allegedly owned by Ahmed. Initial reports claimed a policeman died in the encounter. But the Andhra Pradesh DGP later denied that. News reports also spoke of a “10-hour gunbattle”, which, too, turned out to be untrue as there had been no exchange of fire. This reporter found no bullet marks in that house.
Immediately after the arrests, the police said the men were responsible for the July murders of S Vellaiyappan, who belonged to Hindu Munnani, a fringe right-wing outfit, and the BJP’s Tamil Nadu general secretary V Ramesh. Police said the men had also plotted to kill Advani during a political rally in 2011 near Madurai.
The Karnataka Police, too, claimed it was Malik who had planted a bomb on a motorcycle that went off in front of the BJP office in Bengaluru in April.
The police made it appear as if the arrested men were a “big catch”. But the truth is the police have known the men for years during which, according to their counsel, authorities filed bogus criminal cases on terror charges. In many cases, the men have already been acquitted.
Malik was first arrested along with three others in 2005 for the murder of Kalidas, anRSS activist, in Madurai. The victim’s son had named two men, both of whom were later convicted, but not Malik and the other three. The trial court acquitted those three. But as Malik was a minor, a juvenile court heard his case. Later, the police booked him in two more cases, including for assault. “They would pick him up any time, search the house and grill him for hours,” recalls Ghazni, Malik’s brother. In 2008, Malik absconded, which is why his case is still open.
Malik’s family says the police have given no evidence of his involvement in Kalidas’ murder. And yet, the constant harassment and false charges forced Malik, the third son of a Madurai scrap merchant, to become a fugitive. “We gave him a good education as we didn’t want him to face poverty as we had, but his life has been ruined,” says Ghazni. But why would the police pick specifically on Malik? Ghazni says his brother’s only misfortune was being related to one of the other three accused, who were subsequently acquitted.
After absconding, Malik married a woman named Husna, who is 20 now. They have three children. According to their neighbours in Puttur, the couple sold kitchenware to low-income households, bartering them for old clothes. On and off, they also sold vegetables on a cart. At other times, Malik also engaged in the scrap business. “The police have warned both my parents and in-laws against helping me and my husband,” Husna told TEHELKA at Ghazni’s residence, where she has temporarily moved in.
Ismail, who was arrested along with Malik on 5 October, also has a somewhat similar story. Working as a small-time property broker, he first came on the police radar for the murder of an RSS activist named Muthukrishnan in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district in 2000. With five others named in that case, Ismail was eventually acquitted. The police then charged him with assaulting a Muslim man. In that case, too, Ismail was acquitted.
Once again, Ismail’s family says it was his misfortune to be related to a number of men who had been accused of carrying out a bombing in Coimbatore in 1998, which killed more than 50 people ahead of a rally that Advani was to attend. Nearly 170 activists were booked and 41 were convicted for life imprisonment. After an appeal in the high court, 24 of them were acquitted in 2008, including People’s Democratic Party leader Abdul Nasar Madani. Of the acquitted, four of them were re-arrested this year in the BengaluruBJP office blast case. The appeals of 17 persons are pending before the Supreme Court.
Fakhruddin Ahmed, the third man whom the police arrested in Chennai on 4 October, had dropped out of school after Class III. As his father had been an assistant sub-inspector, Ahmed earned the nickname ‘Police Fakhruddin’. His father passed away when he was five. His mother left to become a housemaid in Qatar.
Growing up without parents in a rough neighbourhood, Ahmed’s first brush with the law came at the age of 15 when he quarrelled with a milk vendor, according to Ahmed’s brother, Dervesh Muynuddin. In 1995, he was charged for setting a bus on fire. In the same year, the police accused him along with three others of planting a bomb inMadurai’s Meenakshi temple. But the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) later found the real culprits and admitted that their inclusion in the case had been a “mistake”. After six months in jail, all four were freed without being named in the chargesheet.
To escape further entanglements with the police, Ahmed left Madurai and settled at Karur city, about 150 km away. Nevertheless, the police accused him in 1998 for the murder of yet another Hindu right-wing activist named Paramasivam in Madurai and put him in prison. It would be nearly three years before he would be acquitted and freed from prison. But not for long. In 2001, Ahmed was accused of helping a local Muslim leader named Imam Ali escape from police custody. Just months later, the police shot Ali dead in Bengaluru.
Although only a police inspector testified as a witness, the trial court sentenced Ahmed to seven years in prison. Even the FIR did not name him. His appeal against his conviction is now pending at the Supreme Court, his counsel, Abdul Kalam Bahadursha, told TEHELKA. Ahmed served out his term and was freed in 2008. Not taking any chances after more than a decade of police frame-ups, Ahmed decided not to settle down in Madurai.
Do the police have any evidence against the three arrested men in the July murders and the bombing conspiracies of Madurai and Bengaluru this year? A closer examination shows that the question can only be answered in the negative.
On 29 July, BJP general secretary V Ramesh, 52, was murdered in his office in Salem. The prime witness, a 71-year-old watchman, could not identify two suspects out of three as the streetlights were out. The suspect he identified could not be nabbed. A sketch made from his description matches none of the accused.
Similarly, Hindu Munnani leader S Vellaiyappan, 45, was murdered in Vellore on 1 July at around 4 pm. No witnesses came forward and no theories were cited. More than three months later, however, the police suddenly claim that the three men it arrested on 4-5 October were responsible for that killing.
Earlier, on 28 June, a 35-year-old milk vendor named B Suresh Kumar was stabbed to death at his stall at around 10.40 pm in Madurai. Though CCTV cameras caught the gruesome murder, the police were unable to identify the killers due to the video feed’s bad quality. Later, two persons named Taufeeq and Abdullah were produced as co-accused in this case, who apparently confessed to the police that Ahmed was the main accused.
In 2011, before Advani was to arrive at Madurai as part of his nationwide political roadshow named Jan Chetna Yatra, a villager noticed a suspicious wire, which led the police to discover a bomb under a bridge. The police arrested two men, Abdullah and Ismat, and accused them of providing motorcycles and an autorickshaw to Ahmed and Malik to carry out the crimes. But the police themselves have said Ahmed was seen using Abdullah’s motorcycle at a place that is 30 km from where the bomb was found.
As for the 17 April bomb blast in front of the BJP office in Bengaluru, in which 16 people, including 11 cops were wounded, the police’s claim that Ismail, Malik and Ahmed were behind that bombing flies in the face of the facts of the case. The police had earlier arrested 17 Muslim men for the blast. But it was found that a SIM card used to trigger the blast had belonged to an RSS leader. The police then said it had been stolen from him a day earlier. Interestingly, the RSS leader failed to report the theft to the police. Yet, the police did not call him to verify how his SIM card had landed with the accused.
When questioned about the lack of evidence against the accused, CB-CID IGP MK Aggarwal said: “There is enough evidence against these men. But as the investigations are under process, I cannot reveal anything at the moment.”
Like the earlier times, the case against the three men may already be weakening. On 12 October, Ahmed told a judge in Vellore that the police had forced him at gunpoint to confess to his involvement in these recent cases. The police will need to do some hard work if they must prove the charges of terrorism against these men.
