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I did not believe in 2002 that there was an organised conspiracy that led to the Godhra train burning and nine years later in 2011 my belief remains the same. Notwithstanding the judgment delivered by the trial court.
Well, it was always not like this. For the first month after the February 27, 2002, carnage, I believed like most others that coach S6 of Sabarmati Express had been deliberately put on fire. But at that time I had not visited Godhra. I went to Godhra at the end of March 2002 and ran into the deputy superintendent of police Bava, who was investigating the case and his boss inspector general of police Agja. Both were at the police post adjacent to the platform of Godhra station when we ran into them. (I say we because with me was our then bureau chief in Vadodara and now editor of Chandigarh edition, Raja Bose). I asked the duo how far they had proceeded in unravelling the conspiracy. The cops said that if there was a conspiracy they were yet to come across any evidence. I could not believe what they were saying but managed to keep a straight face. “If there was no evidence how did the coach get burnt?” I asked. Mr Agja said that he was not sure but added that at any time there were 20-30 vendors on the platform hawking their wares like tea. Most of them carried small-sized gas cylinders with burners with them. In the midst of a fracas that had broken out between the kar sevaks and these vendors things could have turned ugly with some vendors throwing in burning rags inside the train. This could have caused a fire, Agja concluded but emphasized that this was a possibility but not his definitive account of what had happened. I asked the inspector general whether he could be quoted by name on what he had said: “Yes,” he said and became emotional and said that he had merely a year and a half of service and at this stage he cared for nothing other than the truth. He looked at Bava and said: “He has only a month left, why should he bothered either?”
Before running the story I checked Agja’s story with many top police officers. They agreed with the argument and said that the belief in the top police echelon was also this. Curiously when the story was front-paged in TOI, in all its editions, the reaction was muted. Late in the afternoon, a distressed Agja called me and said: “Nag sahib, yeh kya kar diya apney?” I said I had checked with him and asked him to cool down. Later in the evening an apologetic public relations officer of the police department called me. “Everyone knows what you wrote is correct, but yet Mr Agja wants us to issue a clarification. You are free to do whatever you want to. When the clarification arrived I found it wishy-washy and threw it into the dustbin. Later I came to know that Narendra Modi had summoned Agja who told him that he had not said anything. This was recounted to me by none other than Mr Modi and when I told him that in fact Agja had said so, the Gujarat chiefminister kept quiet. A little later Agja was transferred.
A man resembling Opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim was seen entering an elevator at the Seri Damansara Condominium on June 26, 2008, according to CCTV footage viewed by the High Court Thursday.
The man, who was dressed in a grey suit, was recorded as entering the elevator at 12.12pm and exiting on the fifth floor at 12.13pm.
He was seen with a briefcase, and was putting on his jacket inside the elevator, in the footage.
He was then recorded re-entering the elevator of the fifth floor with another unidentified man and exiting at Level P1, at 5.14pm.
Complainant Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, who was dressed in light-coloured shirt and black slacks, was also recorded arriving at the condo separately on the same day.
He was recorded entering the elevator, and exiting the elevator on the fifth floor, at 2.42pm.
He was again recorded entering the elevator on the fifth floor at 4.11pm,and exiting the elevator on Level P2, at 4.12pm.
(Mohd Saiful had identified himself as the person in the CCTV footage, at the start of the trial in Feb last year.)
Apart from the two of them, seven vehicles were recorded arriving and leaving the main entrance of the condominium, including an MG Rover bearing the number plate WMK 6, and Saiful’s Fiat bearing the number plate WPK5925.
The High Court viewed the CCTV footage after PDRM Cheras Forensic Labroratory audiovisual analyst ASP Fauziah Che Mat took the stand.
She told the court that she had received two hard disks (containing the CCTV recordings) from investigating officer DSP Jude Blacious Pereira on July 3,2008, for analysis.
She added that her instructions had been to look for the two vehicles (as listed above) on June 26, 2008, between 12pm and 4pm; to identify individuals and the vehicles involved from the end of April to the beginning of May; and to analyse and print out the relevant photographs.
Anwar, 63, has been charged with performing carnal intercourse against theorder of nature on Mohd Saiful at a condominium unit in Bukit Damansara,Kuala Lumpur, between 3.15pm and 4pm on June 26, 2008.
Leading the prosecution was Solicitor-General II Datuk Mohd Yusof Zainal Abiden, while lawyer Karpal Singh led Anwar’s defence team.
Hearing before Justice Mohd Zabidin Mohd Diah continues Friday RELATED ARTICLE TODAY WE KNOW WHY SENIOR ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER (SAC) II MOHD RODWAN MOHD YUSOF MET MOHD SAIFUL BUKHARI AZLAN IN ROOM 619 OF THE CONCORDE HOTEL IN KUALA LUMPUR.
WATCH:
The power has gone out in a typical American town. Wait — it’s not just the electricity. The phones don’t work, either. Portable radios are dead. Cars won’t start.
But then lawn mowers and cars and lights inexplicably start and stop on their own. What’s going on? A meteor? Sunspots? Or are there, as Tommy’s comic book suggests, aliens among us, preparing for a takeover? Suspicion poisons the air. Neighbor turns on neighbor. A scapegoat is blamed. A shot is fired. Panic, madness, riot.
And while the humans behave monstrously, the real monsters watch from a nearby hilltop, working a little gizmo that messes with the power on Maple Street, and marveling how easy it is to manipulate these earthlings into destroying themselves.
In what is arguably the best Twilight Zone episode ever, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” Rod Serling wrote a suburban Lord of the Flies, a parable about the fragility of civilization, paranoia and the susceptibility of nice folks to manipulation.
Watching it when it first aired, in the depths of the nuclear arms race, people thought it was meant to ward off a witch-hunt for Reds under the bed. Today, watching what’s been going on in Madison, Wisconsin, as well as in Washington, D.C., I can’t help thinking that the real monsters are chortling at their success in pitting neighbor against neighbor, and I can’t help marveling at their genius for distraction and unaccountability.
The monsters aren’t Wisconsin’s public employees whose right to collective bargaining has helped their families lead middle-class lives, and who have repeatedly declared their willingness to return to the table and negotiate a shared sacrifice. The monsters are on Wall Street, where state pension funds were sunk into toxic sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. The monsters are on K Street, where lobbyists are fighting financial industry oversight. The monsters are the politicians who are using Wisconsin’s deficit as a pretext to demonizepublic employees and bust their unions.
If you look at the budget that House Republicans just passed, if you listen to the “so be it” language of their leadership, you’d think that the federal deficit is caused by the very people who who’ve been suffering the most in this recession.
But the monsters aren’t low-income pregnant women and mothers who can’t afford adequate nutrition for their families; or sick Americans who can’t find health insurance to cover them; or blue-collar workers who want to retire at an age when there’s still some life left in their bodies; or students who can’t afford college without Pell Grants; or people who think their government’s job includes preventing their air and water from poisoningthem.
Sitting on the hilltop, watching Americans turn one another into bogeymen, evading scrutiny and responsibility, are the real sources of our distress.
They’re the bankers who’ve extorted trillions of public treasure, blowing up the deficit while awarding themselves inconceivably fat bonuses.
They’re the billionaires who’ve benefited from a massive transfer of wealth from the middle to the top, and whose political puppets protect them from paying their fair share of taxes.
They’re the corporations whose cash has convinced Congress to deregulate industry after industry, despite all evidence that it is the enforcement of rules — not the magic of the marketplace — that protects the public’s rights.
They’re the defense contractors and pork appropriators who’ve used the cover of “national security” to shield the Pentagon’s budget and its procurement process from the cuts and reforms that even Republicans like the Secretary of Defense are advocating.
They’re the front groups and propagandists, like FreedomWorks and Fox, who use class warfare and culture wars in order to turn Americans against their own economic interests.
They’re the Supreme Court justices whose Citizens United decision, overthrowing a century of settled law, has made our campaign finance system an open sewer, and whose indifference to conflicts of interest in a coming case promises to throw sick people back onto the tender mercies of insurers and to destroy our best hope to curb Medicare costs – further ballooning the deficit and providing cover for even more draconian cuts.
The game in Washington is to use the deficit as camouflage for destroying government’s capacity to promote the general welfare. The game in Wisconsin and other states whose new Republican governors and legislative majorities are feeling their oats is to shelter the income of the wealthiest, and to balance the budget on the backs of the middle class.
At the end of the episode, Rod Serling says this: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record: Prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the twilight zone.”
Sometimes it’s hard to watch the news and not think that things are surreal. The other day, when what’s been happening in Madison reminded me of what happened on “Maple Street,” I suddenly realized the theme music that goes with it.
Abdul Gani Patail, the slimiest Attorney-General Malaysia has had to endure.
Look at these faces closely, folks. Some you already know, only too well – like the infamous asshole pictured right, pretending piety while lying and oozing semen through every orifice…A few you wouldn’t recognize even if they were sitting next to you on the train. If investigating officer DSP Jude Blacious Pereira (below, left) wasn’t in uniform, would you recognize him on the street?
They all have one thing in common: their involvement in the obscene plot to put Anwar Ibrahim back behind bars over a nonsensical charge of sodomy – in the hope that with Anwar locked away, the opposition coalition called Pakatan Rakyat will lose its impetus to replace Barisan Najis as the government of the day in Malaysia.The statutes against anal and oral sex are a relic of Victorian era colonial rule. Whereas in Britain these statutes have long fallen into disuse and died a natural death, in Malaysia they have been dusted off and abused, twice, to persecute one particular individual – a charismatic political figure named Anwar Ibrahim, whose greatest crime was to challenge the extended dictatorial reign of Mahathir Mohamad, who became prime minister in 1981 and only stepped down on 31 October 2003 under pressure from his political party, Umno.
Anwar Ibrahim has the dubious distinction of being the only Malaysian to be publicly humiliated by accusations of pederasty, and forced to endure tortuous and twisted mock trials presided over by kangaroo judges – like the late unlamented Augustine Paul and the gormless Zabidin Mohd Diah (pictured left).Anwar was also imprisoned for 6 years and an insidious attempt made on his life while serving out his sentence through gradual arsenic poisoning. All this occurred under Mahathir Mohamad’s watch – and the same old shit is happening again to Anwar Ibrahim under Najib Razak’s insufferable crime ministership.
Dr Seah Lay Hong, government forensic chemist, seems less concerned with the truth than keeping her job…
And we the public seem capable of only watching this perverse abuse of the law and shaking our heads in utter disbelief.We owe it to ourselves – and our own posterity – to stop this gross mockery of rule of law and massive insult to our intelligence. In approximately one month, the mock trial of Anwar Ibrahim (Phase Two) will grind to an inevitable conclusion. Solicitor-General II Yusof Zainal Abidin (above, right), leads the prosecution with an inquisitorial fervor totally inappropriate to the frivolity of the alleged offence, and the grotesquely shady circumstances surrounding it.
After all, Saiful the Accuser stated in open court that he visited the then deputy prime minister, Najib Razak, and his power-hungry wife Rosmah Mansor, at their private residence a couple of days before lodging a police report against Anwar. Najib himself was forced to admit as much during a press conference on 3 July 2008. This fact alone is enough to cast an opague shadow of serious doubt over the entire political charade.
If we allow this great son of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, to be imprisoned again for a completely anachronistic “crime” – and it’s absolutely irrelevant whether or not the accusation leveled against him has any basis whatsoever – then we as citizens of this nation fully deserve to be mentally shackled, morally deformed, and condemned to neverending BN misrule unto forever.
Goodbye… begone… and don’t come back!
READMORE ENEMIES OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE!
READMORE ENEMIES OF TRUTH AND JUSTICE!
SEX NEEDS TO BE SPONTANEOUS AND ONLY THEN DOES IT COMPLETELY FULFILL AND PLEASE ONE. HERE ARE THREE STEPS THAT WILL GUARANTEE ULTIMATE SEXUAL PLEASURE.READMOREFARAH
SEX NEEDS TO BE SPONTANEOUS AND ONLY THEN DOES IT COMPLETELY FULFILL AND PLEASE ONE. HERE ARE THREE STEPS THAT WILL GUARANTEE ULTIMATE SEXUAL PLEASURE.READMOREFARAHBernama NEWS
The end result is there for everybody to see: the judge says that there was a conspiracy behind the burning of the train but lets off the main conspirator, Umarji. Well, if you ask me here is where the conspiracy angle is knocked out straight away. Interestingly the case is proven on the testimony of some of the accused who later retracted their statements. Little surprise that the judge upholding the conspiracy angle has let off most of those arraigned before his court of law.
I am aware that many of the readers of this blog post will heap many accusations on me: of being a pseudo-secularist and going out of the way and appeasing the minorities. Of being anti-Hindu and not being sympathetic to the families of all those who perished. My submission to them: Don’t treat Godhra like the Ramajanmabhoomi issue as a matter of faith. Truth is often stranger than fiction. It is the merely the trial court that has delivered its judgment. There are two more levels of courts that the verdict will have to pass through. The last word has not been heard on Godhra.
POSTED BY MUSLIMMALAYSIA786
Who would have imagined that a small alleged scuffle on Godhra platform in the evening of 27th February nine years ago would stain the secular India by a lot of bloodshed? As mentioned by Wikipedia.com, the unprecedented repercussions of the sordid event of burning 58 passengers, mostly Hindu pilgrims, led to “the retaliatory massacres against Muslims on a large scale, in which 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed. 223 more people were reported missing. 523 places of worship were damaged: 298 dargahs, 205 mosques, 17 temples, and 3 churches. Muslim-owned businesses suffered the bulk of the damage. 61,000 Muslims and 10,000 Hindus fled their homes. Preventive arrests of 17,947 Hindus and 3,616 Muslims were made. In total 27,901 Hindus and 7,651 Muslims were arrested. Nearly 10,000 rounds of bullets were fired by the police, killing 93 Muslims and 77 Hindus”. The local Muslims have been maintaining that the scuffle, the burning of S-6 compartment and the entailing riots were the part of one big conspiracy. Their viewpoint got strength from the report of the Ahmedabad-based Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL), which expressed that “it is impossible that inflammable liquid could have been poured from outside into the train compartment”. One of the reasons it gave was that the height of the window of the coach was around 7 feet from the ground at the place and in the position it was not possible to throw any inflammable fluid inside from outside the coach from any bucket because by doing this, most of the fluid was getting thrown outside. According to the report, inflammable liquid was already present in the train compartment and fire started from inside. New Delhi: Union Law Minister M Veerappa Moily has finally accepted the fact that there is inability on the part of Court or the Constitution to safeguard minority rights at times. His statement comes a week after former Chief Justice of India A. M. Ahmadi accepted that the Supreme Court could have prevented the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Moily said, “At times Courts or the Constitution may become helpless to go to the “rescue of the minority when there is a tyranny of the majority.” Moily said this while addressing a gathering at a panel discussion on Indian Constitution and the US Bill of Rights, a report in the Indian Express said. Elaborating further on his idea about safeguarding minority rights in India and a comparison with the US, Moily said that US President Eisenhower had sent federal police to take action and put an African-American student back on the bus, when that student was reportedly thrown out. But if an Indian Prime Minister or the President does the same kind of thing in case of any discrimination, then “a stricture may come from the Supreme Court,” he further added. the burning of a train in the village of Godhra, in India’s Gujarat state, in 2002 killed 59 Hindu pilgrims. Rightist Hindu politicians blamed Muslims for the fire and it led to Indian’s worst religious violence in years, killing about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims After a trial lasting almost nine years, 59 people were found guilty. Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri reports from Ghodr READMORE |
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