New Delhi: The miasma of 26/11 has congealed around the one-room Thane tenement that Faheem Arshad Ansari calls home, imprisoning him as surely as his cell in Arthur Road jail once did. Last month, Ansari was forced to move court after the Maharashtra Police denied him a licence to drive an auto-rickshaw, claiming that as a former member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, he poses a security risk.
The taint of 26/11 lost him opportunities to return to his old job in the United Arab Emirates, and his family has had to face social isolation. “Life has been one long case,” Ansari says. “Lawyers, dates, files, it never ends.”
The extradition of Tahawwur Rana to face trial on charges of enabling the months-long reconnaissance operation that allowed the Lashkar-e-Taiba to choose its targets in Mumbai and then conduct the massacre marks an important moment in securing justice for the 26/11 victims.
For Ansari, though, the trial marks a different kind of closure: An official admission that fabricated testimony was used by the Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch to frame him for providing maps of the 26/11 targets to the Lashkar.
Even though Ansari was acquitted of the allegations in 2010—in the course of the same trial which led to 26/11 killer Muhammad Ajmal Kasab receiving a death sentence—the Maharashtra Government unsuccessfully appealed to the High Court and Supreme Court.
Following the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrest of David Headley and Tahawwur Rana in 2009, Maharashtra prosecutors doubled down on their story—even as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed a separate case against the men arrested.
Like the trial court and High Court, the Supreme Court held that testimony by the star witness against Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmad—the confessional statement of Ajmal Kasab himself—was “unworthy of reliance.” Evidence from another key witness, Nooruddin Sheikh, was also “completely unacceptable,” Justices Aftab Alam and Chandramauli Prasad recorded. There was, however, no investigation into the prospect that the Mumbai Police tampered with evidence in a case of global significance.
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A Lashkar’s agent?
Leaving his room at Batatawala Chawl on Patthe Bapurao Marg early each morning and returning late, Sahil Pavaskar seemed to live the kind of colourless life shared by hundreds of thousands of young migrants to Mumbai. Fellow students at SoftPro Computers in Mumbai’s Fort thought he had moved from New Delhi in search of work. Few got to know him well, though. Even though the young man’s family lived in Goregaon, he did not contact them during his stay.
Then, in January 2008, a Lashkar assault team attacked a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur, killing seven officers and a bystander. The investigations led back to Pavaskar—who police identified by his real name, Faheem Ansari.
Friends like Nooruddin Sheikh told police investigators that Ansari had long been fixated on violent jihadism, once telling co-workers at the Dubai printing press where he worked that Osama Bin Laden was his role model. Then, police allege, he left his job and travelled to the Bait-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar’s headquarters in Muzaffarabad, in February 2007 for a 10-month combat training course.
The Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch alleged that the Lashkar had tasked Ansari with conducting reconnaissance of possible targets, including the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Mahalakshmi Temple, the Siddhivinayak Temple, the police complex at Crawford Market, the Maharashtra police headquarters at Colaba.
Eight men linked to the attack were arrested, including two Pakistani nationals. Their trial concluded in November 2019, less than a year after 26/11. Local villagers Gulab Khan and Kausar Farooqi, held for harbouring the terrorists, were acquitted. For his part, Ansari was found guilty of possession of weapons and having an illegal Pakistani passport but acquitted of the significant charge of waging war against the Indian state.
The prosecution, lawyer M.S.Khan noted, was unable to prove Ansari was linked to the Lashkar, or the other men convicted of the attack on the CRPF.
The 26/11 twist
Even as the trial in Rampur proceeded, the Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch brought separate charges against Ansari, alleging Ansari had made a series of maps to facilitate the 26/11 attacks. The claims were based on alleged confessional testimony by Kasab, saying that he was shown the hand-drawn maps at the Lashkar’s command centre in Karachi and was told “that Faheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed in Hindustan had prepared those maps and sent them from there.”
The courts treated these claims with scepticism for several reasons. For one, the attackers had been shown detailed videos of their targets. Then, they were trained using high-resolution maps downloaded from the internet and were equipped with Global Positioning System sets. Finally, the maps produced in court were implausibly clean, with no creases or stains.
“I drew those maps in the police lock-up,” Ansari told ThePrint. “The option was more beatings, and by that time, I was ready to confess to anything.”
Even as the 26/11 trial proceeded, FBI investigators arrested David Headley, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who had joined the Lashakr-e-Taiba and made several visits to Mumbai to film targets for the Lashkar. Those visits were enabled by Tahawwur Rana, a Canadian-Pakistani immigration agency owner who provided Headley with papers claiming he represented the business.
The NIA visited Chicago in the summer of 2010 and confirmed his story. In spite of this new evidence, Mumbai prosecutors chose not to withdraw their allegations against Ansari. Together with his associate, Headley was convicted in the US in 2013.
Allegations that the Mumbai Police fabricated evidence have tainted several high-profile terrorism cases, notably the bombing of multiple trains in 2006. In spite of compelling evidence that the Indian Mujahideen urban terrorism network carried out the bombings, Maharashtra prosecutors brought charges against six men, five of whom have been sentenced to death.
The Mumbai High Court is currently hearing an appeal against the conviction.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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