NIA reaches house of man wrongly jailed in 7/11 blasts case

The dawn swoop by the National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) Lucknow team on Wednesday was part of a country-wide crackdown on alleged activists of the Popular Front of India

MUMBAI: The 5am knock on the grille door of his house at Vikhroli threatened once again to upturn the life Abdul Wahid Shaikh, 45, who has painstakingly rebuilt after he was acquitted in the July 2006 serial train blasts case in which 188 people had died.

Mumbai, India - Oct. 11, 2023: NIA raids underway at the residence of acquitted accused Wahid Sheikh, in Vikhroli in Mumbai, India, on Wednesday, October 11, 2023. (Photo by Satish Bate/ Hindustan Times) (Hindustan Times)

The dawn swoop by the National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) Lucknow team on Wednesday was part of a country-wide crackdown on alleged activists of the Popular Front of India.

The federal agency on Wednesday carried out search operations at 20-odd locations across the country, including at Mumbai and Thane in Maharashtra, and several places in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in connection with its ongoing probe against the banned Popular Front of India (PFI).

“These NIA operations are part of ongoing investigations in cases linked with the Popular Front of India and their involvement in unlawful and anti-national activities,” said an NIA officer who declined to elaborate why they were conducting a search at Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s home in Vikhroli.

Shaikh, a school teacher at Anjuman-e-Islam school in Maulana Shaukat Ali Road, had been jailed for nine years in the 7/11 serial train blasts in Mumbai in 2006. In 2015, a special court acquitted him, pronouncing him innocent. Since then, Shaikh has been trying to rebuild his life and reputation. He wrote a book, Begunah Qaidi which is now being published in English; a film on his life called Haemolymph released last year, and in the nine years of jail he studied law and fought his own case. He now uses his legal knowledge to help his co-accused in the blasts case as also for protecting rights of prisoners.

On Wednesday, when the plainclothed NIA team accompanied by local police reached his door at 5am, he refused to open the door demanding that they first show him a proper search warrant and furnish the details of the FIR, if any, against him which they did not have on them. After hours of back and forth between the NIA team outside Shaikh’s house and the senior officers in Lucknow, a search warrant was procured and Shaikh let the NIA team inside his house at 11.15am, 6 hours after they had first knocked.

He also released a video statement pointing out the errors in the way the NIA team was trying to enter his home and alleged that somebody had tampered with the CCTV camera located diagonally across the door of his house. The search operation, he said, should be videotaped.

The NIA’s countrywide operation on Wednesday is linked to a case recorded by the Phulwarisharif police station in Patna, Bihar, on July 12, 2022, which was subsequently taken over by the NIA Delhi unit for investigation on July 22 last year.

“The core allegation of the Patna case centres around the gathering of individuals with suspicious intent in the Phulwarisharif area. On July 11 last year, at around 7.30 pm, a raid was executed by the officers of Phulwarisharif police station, based on confidential information,” the NIA officer told HT. The search at the rented residence of a certain Athar Parvez in Bihar led to the alleged discovery of important material closely associated with PFI.

On Wednesday, NIA claimed to have recovered cache of crucial evidence in the ongoing case. They seized laptops, mobile phones, SIM cards, memory cards, pen-drives, hard discs, and documents from the places they raided. The agency also seized an amount of ₹8.5 lakh.

Neighbours who had gathered around Shaikh’s house said the family kept a low profile, both his children were in high school and wife was a homemaker. Zakira, Shaikh’s sister-in-law, said, “My brother-in-law is innocent but he is still being harassed. As a lawyer he gives legal advice to those who were convicted in the train blasts case as he believes that it is his duty to help the innocent. May be his legal association with the blast case convicts brought the authorities to his door.”

She denied that that Shaikh was associated with the PFI in any manner whatsoever.

A team of NIA officers also interrogated a certain Saeed Narekar in his residence in Rabodi in Thane early in the morning. Narekar was earlier booked in two cases under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. According to sources, Saeed Narekar was earlier an active member of the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).

The NIA team left Shaikh’s house at around 4.30pm. Later, Shaikh told media that the NIA did not allegedly find anything objectionable at his house and that he has no links with the PFI. Shaikh said that to ensure that he does not get implicated falsely in any case, he had called in his legal team during the search by NIA.