The men gathered early one morning in a one-room tenement inside the Deccan Cooperative Society in Sewri, on the grimy eastern fringes of suburban Mumbai. They began packing ammonium nitrate-fuel oil gel, the lethal but readily available commercial explosive used across India, inside 35-kilogram pressure cookers. Then, a detonator cap was loaded into each pressure cooker and linked to a simple Ajanta-brand digital clock, set to 6:30 pm. Each cooker was then packed in a shopping bag.
Later that evening, on 11 July 2006, 209 people died—far more than on 26/11—when the bombs went off in packed first-class compartments on seven separate trains running from Churchgate.
This week, 19 years on, the Bombay High Court finally held what successive governments, police services, and the intelligence services themselves have long known: The five men sent to death row for their role in the bombings, and the seven others given shorter sentences, had nothing to do with the bombing. The Maharashtra government has announced it will appeal—but disturbing evidence will surface that the botched trial has enabled the terrorists actually responsible for the crime to evade responsibility.
Intelligence and police services at the time were struggling to detect the real workings of the Lashkar-e-Taiba-linked network that came to be known as the Indian Mujahideen. Therefore, following the 7/11 bombing, the usual suspects—generally men with loose ties to conservative Muslim groups—were pulled in and charged with terrorism, as was the pattern in several prosecutions from the period.
Following the bombing of the Sankat Mochan Temple in Varanasi, as well as the local railway station, the Imam of the mosque at Phulpur was arrested and charged with the murder of 28 people. The Uttar Pradesh police alleged that Waliullah had handed over the explosives and the pressure cooker cases to three terrorists from Bangladesh, who were never identified. The Imam was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of an assault rifle and grenades. In 2022, he was sentenced to death for his alleged role in the bombing.
The bombings—and the arrests—went on. Following bombings at Sarojini Nagar, Govindpuri, and Paharganj in October 2009, just a day before Diwali, Srinagar resident Mohammad Hussain Fazili was charged with organising the terrorist attacks. Together with his friend Mohammad Rafiq Shah, Fazili was later acquitted of all charges. A third man who had been arrested, Tariq Dar, was convicted of charges related to supporting terrorism but cleared of a role in the actual strike.
Faking justice
Five years ago, a court sentenced Kamal Ansari, Faisal Shaikh, Ehtesham Siddiqui, Naveed Khan, and Asif Khan to death for their role in the 11 July Mumbai train blasts. Seven other conspirators were handed down life sentences; just one alleged perpetrator, Wahid Sheikh, was acquitted. For the hundreds of families torn apart by one of the world’s most savage acts of mass-casualty terrorism, the law seemed to have finally brought closure.
There were strange elements in the prosecution’s story, which surfaced on the margins of media reportage. The police claimed that the bombers had been accompanied by Pakistani accomplices, a mysterious Bollywood-ish touch never seen in past terror attacks. A Pakistani terrorist was shot dead in Mumbai’s Antop Hill, but his ties to the case never surfaced in the trial.
And then, there were the common-sense questions. The Govandi room, where the explosives were assembled according to police, barely had the space to seat four people, let alone the team of eight purported to have made bombs there, journalist Sagar Rajput reported.
The questions turned to embarrassment in November 2007. Newsrooms across the country began receiving emails from an organisation calling itself the Indian Mujahideen—a term used to distinguish it from Pakistani groups, rather than a brand in itself. The emails were often sent seconds before terrorist attacks. The first email claimed responsibility for earlier attacks, including Varanasi in 2006, Hyderabad in August 2007, and the 7/11 Mumbai train bombings.
Each of the emails cast the actions of the perpetrators as revenge for the 2002 communal massacre in Gujarat. The email issued after the Ahmedabad bombing of 26 July 2008, for example, said that the Indian Mujahideen was “raising the illustrious banner of jihad against the Hindus and all those who fight and resist us.”
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Police under pressure
Faking it isn’t, of course, a uniquely Indian talent. The ‘usual suspects’ were also lined up in London after the bombs went off at the Horse and Groom, Seven Stars, and the King’s Arms pubs. Paul Hill was identified by a British Army Intelligence Officer in Belfast, who noticed he had shoulder-length fair hair. The photograph the officer was looking at, though, was of two women survivors, not a perpetrator. Gerry Conlon was picked up based on past suspicion of ties to the Irish Republican Army, which were never proven. Patrick Armstrong and his girlfriend, Carole Richardson, were living in squats.
“The English language is rich in words, but no single one can adequately describe your crime,” Justice John Donaldson declared at sentencing. There was one he didn’t consider: innocent. There were no worthwhile forensics, alibis were ignored, and credible claims of torture were dismissed.
Later, when the Guildford Four had become middle-aged, an official investigation conducted by the British parliament would conclude: “The material then in the possession of the Crown, including such explanations as the police officers concerned were then prepared to offer, cast such a real doubt upon the reliability and veracity of the evidence upon which the prosecution was founded that it was inevitable that the convictions should be regarded as unsafe.”
The first serious challenge to the 7/11 case came from deep inside the Indian police system, when investigators at the Andhra Pradesh police’s counter-terrorism unit decided to conduct a forensic analysis of the explosives. Each of the bombs, investigators concluded in an analysis available with ThePrint, used identical bomb-making techniques and materials, fitting a Samay-brand electrical clock, boosted with a nine-volt battery.
“As a practice,” the Andhra Pradesh investigators noted, “they used red/yellow/brown wires for the positive wires and white/black wires for the negative terminal.”
The Indian Mujahideen only once experimented with an alternative timer, using electrically-erasable programmable read-only memory, for 27 improvised explosive devices planted in Surat on 26 July 2008. The bombs fizzled—and the bomb-maker went back to doing things the old way.
Later, in 2008, the Delhi police, acting on information provided by the Intelligence Bureau, stumbled into an apartment in Batla House, which housed the Indian Mujahideen’s co-founder, Atif Ameen. Ameen was killed in the shootout, together with Delhi police officer Mohan Chand Sharma.
The top leadership of the Indian Mujahideen fled to Karachi, and then to the Islamic State in Syria, where Mohammad Sajid, Abu Rashid Ahmad, and Shahnawaz Alam are believed to have died in combat. The men, however, released a videotape claiming responsibility for their attacks, including the 7/11 train blasts, and warning of more.
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Truth is out there
In the early 2010s, led by then-Superintendents of Police Vikas Vaibhav and Swayam Prakash Pani, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) began a comprehensive investigation into the Indian Mujahideen’s genesis and metastasis. The inquiry focused on how a small group of Islamist youth activists from Azamgarh and Bhatkal, breaking away from the Students Islamic Movement of India, turned to organised crime groups to secure training with the Lashkar.
The NIA didn’t investigate the Mumbai case, since that was already under trial. In its 2014 chargesheet, though, the agency asserted, in a separate case, that “the accused Asadullah Akhtar was aware of the participation of the members of his group in the Indian Mujahideen in the blasts at Sarojini Nagar, Delhi, in 2005, Mumbai train blasts in 2006, Gorakhpur blasts in 2007 and UP court blasts in 2007.”
“The Mumbai train blasts,” the chargesheet read, “were carried out by Indian Mujahideen operatives including but not limited to Sadiq Sheikh, Bada Sajid [Big] Sajid, a nickname for Mohammad Sajid], Atif Ameen and Abu Rashid.”
For its part, Maharashtra’s Crime Branch had also filed a chargesheet on the 7/11 bombings, based on alleged Indian Mujahideen member Sadiq Israr Sheikh. That chargesheet remains sealed, without ever having been heard in court. A one-time air conditioning mechanic from Mumbai’s Cheeta Camp, Sheikh said the Gujarat pogroms radicalised him. In search of vengeance, he sought out a relative with crime-world contacts, Salim Azmi. Azmi, in turn, introduced him to the ganglord Asif Reza Khan, who was sending the first Indian Mujahideen cadre to Pakistan.
Later, in confessional testimony to the Gujarat Police—which cannot be used, according to Indian law, for his trial—Sheikh provided a graphic account of what happened in 7/11.
“I would go first with one bag to Churchgate, and keep the bag in the First Class compartment,” one of the men later told the NIA in a classified interrogation. “I would get down at Marine Lines station, and then go back to Churchgate. Next, Atif would leave with two bags and also return to Churchgate. Abu Rashid and Sajid will take one bag each and keep the bags in the selected trains. Finally, Shahnawaz would come to Churchgate with two bags, and we would put both of them in the trains.”
In April 2013, Sheikh appeared before the court, summoned by the defence to tell his story in the 7/11 case. He denied knowing the perpetrators, and claimed the Crime Branch had tortured him into confessing his role in the bombings.
“The story that you say was given by the Crime Branch,” a defence lawyer suggested to him, “was not, in fact, a story but the factual position about the 7/11 railway blasts.”
He did not lie: “I do not want to answer this question.”
Today, it’s time someone does.
Praveen Swami is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)