Kashmir recruitment case: HC upholds conviction of suspected LeT operative Thadiyantavida Nazeer and nine others

Barely three-and-a-half months after he was acquitted in the Kozhikode twin blasts case, Kerala High Court on Monday upheld the Ernakulam National Investigation Agency (NIA) Court's conviction of suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Thadiyantavida Nazeer, along with nine others, in the Kashmir recruitment case.

Though the NIA special court had in 2013 convicted 13, the High Court acquitted three: the 2nd, 14th and 22nd accused. In 2013, the NIA had drawn up a list of 18 accused but the NIA court had acquitted five of them. Among the rest, 10 were given life imprisonment and three were slapped with double lifer.

The charge was that Nazeer and the other accused had recruited Malayali youths to LeT's terror camps in Jammu and Kashmir. The NIA had then said that the Kerala connection came to light after an encounter in 2008 when security forces shot down terrorists in Kashmir. Four of them - Fayas, Abdul Rahim, Mohammed Yasin and Fayis - turned out to be from Kerala.

These four were among the 24 originally accused in the case. Among the accused, two - namely Muhammad Sabir alias K P Sabir and Pakistan national Abdul Wali, had escaped the NIA net. Sabir was later nabbed from Hyderabad.

The NIA Special Court, in its 2013 order had said that there was sufficient evidence to define the activities of the guilty as waging war against the Government of India, punishable under Section 121 of the IPC and commission of terrorist act as defined in Section 15 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, punishable under Section 16 of the Act.

The convicted, including Nazeer, had then moved the High Court. The NIA, too, moved the High Court against the special court's decision to acquit five of the accused. The High Court on Monday did not overturn the acquittal of the five.

In an extraordinary move, the High Court had allowed the NIA to examine a witness before the Court during the course of the trial in April. Usually, witness examinations in criminal appeals are completed at the trial courts. The witness was a BSNL official who had revealed a call record of the accused communicating with certain persons in Kashmir.

Thadiyantavida Nazeer, said to be a close associate of Abdul Nazar Madhani, was one of the prime accused in the Kozhikode twin blasts that took place in 2006. The blasts happened in two locations in Kozhikode town, one at the Mofussil bus stand and the other at the KSRTC bus stand.

The modus operandi of the blasts was unique because the alleged perpetrators had called up the Collectorate and the media houses in Kozhikode and informed them of the placement of bombs. This allowed the police to act swiftly and evacuate the public from these highly crowded areas, keeping the casualties low. Two people were injured.

The blasts were said to be engineered in retaliation for the refusal to grant bail to certain Muslims accused in the 2003 Marad riots.

On January 22 this year, the High Court acquitted Nazeer and his alleged accomplice Shafas, both of whom were awarded life sentences in the case. "There is no reliable evidence on the preparation or commission of the crime that would incriminate the accused beyond reasonable doubt," the January 22 order said.

The court also did not rely on the confessions of the accused. It was argued by the defence that the confessions were extracted using third-degree methods.

"The Investigators, we cannot but say, did not make a concerted effort to 'go out in the sun' to collect independent evidence of whatever version the accused told them; though we do not venture to speculate whether they employed 'red pepper' to elicit the disclosures. In their anxiety to wrap up the case; we say anxiety since we do not think the Officers of the NIA would be ignorant of the law on the subject, they even recorded the confessions made by the accused, clearly inadmissible under Section 25 & 26 of the Evidence Act," the order said.

Nazeer has been chargesheeted in yet another case, the Kalamassery bus torching case in 2005, in which he along with Sufiya Madhani, the wife of Abdul Nazar Madhani, have been accused of stopping a Tamil Nadu transport bus at gunpoint, forcing its passengers out and then dousing it with petrol and setting it on fire. It was alleged that the accused were demanding the release of Madhani who was in jail for his alleged role in the Coimbatore blasts.