Suleman Bakery owner pleads age as the reason for memory lapse

Mumbai “I don’t remember

Mumbai “I don’t remember.”

Sattar said he didn’t know that an FIR had been filed against the policemen for the firing, claiming that he could not even remember ever having been questioned by the police about the incident (Jyoti Punwani)

These were the most notable words during the deposition of an important prosecution witness in the ongoing Sessions Court trial of policemen accused in the Suleman Usman Bakery firing during the January 1993 riots. The firing left eight dead, five of them bakery workers.

Appearing in court in a wheelchair, 75-year-old Abdul Sattar, owner of the iconic bakery on Mohammed Ali Road, pleaded old age as the reason for his lapse in memory. As advocate PP Ratnavali Patil took him through the incident, he claimed he had forgotten everything except that a firing had taken place inside his bakery in January 1993 during the riots. Since curfew was on, he was home at that time.

Sattar claimed he couldn’t remember how he learnt about the firing, nor did he know who had done it.

About 18-20 workers were employed by him, he said, all of whom lived in the bakery. Five of them died in the firing, he said, but he couldn’t remember their names. A few days after the firing, he said he had visited the Dongri police station and learnt that the bodies were in JJ Hospital. He then collected the bodies from the hospital’s morgue.

Asked if the bodies had wounds on them, Sattar said he couldn’t remember. “They were decomposed,” he added.

He had visited his bakery after the firing, but he could neither remember when, nor what condition it was in.

Sattar said he didn’t know that an FIR had been filed against the policemen for the firing, claiming that he could not even remember ever having been questioned by the police about the incident.

Declaring him hostile, the public prosecutor took him through the statement he had given to the Special Task force (STF) that had investigated the incident in 2001. The STF was set up by the Maharashtra government under pressure from the Supreme Court, which was then hearing a petition demanding the implementation of the B N Srikrishna Commission Report into the December 1992-January 1993 riots in Mumbai.

Justice Srikrishna had indicted former Police Commissioner Ram Dev Tyagi and two of his Special Operations Squad commandos for the Suleman Usman Bakery firing on unarmed Muslims. He had dismissed the police version which stated that police had responded to firing on them from the terrace of the bakery by sten gun-wielding terrorists. Though 78 persons were arrested after the raid, no terrorist was found, nor any sten gun recovered. No policemen were injured either.

Tyagi, then Joint CP, had led the raid on the bakery. He and 17 other policemen were charged with murder in 2001. However, in 2003, he and eight co-accused were discharged.

Two accused policemen have since died.

In his 2001 statement to the STF, which the PP read out to him, Sattar had said that he received many calls informing him about the firing in his bakery that took place on January 9, 1993. He was informed that his front door had been broken due to forcible entry. When he visited the place, he saw blood stains everywhere, including the floor and walls of the bakery’s mezzanine floor and its terrace.

In his statement, Sattar had described the gunshot wounds on the bodies of his workers, and also recounted the detailed description the surviving workers had given him about the raid.

The bakery’s terrace provided access to the madrasa situated just behind, said Sattar. Among those killed that day was a handicapped teacher of the madrasa, Maulana Abul Qasim.

Sattar is the eighth witness to testify in the trial that began in February 2019. Incidentally, the first witness to testify -- a chappal vendor, whose stall is just below the bakery -- had also turned hostile.

Before the trial began, Sattar had, in an interview with this reporter, expressed pessimism about its outcome. Lamenting that the firing had brought disrepute to his bakery, he had added that the subsequent case against the police had put his establishment in their bad books.