A long road to Justice: the story of Irshad Ali

Irshad Ali's story seems straight out of a Bollywood film. After four years of intelligence work, he was on his way to meet his handler, an Intelligence Bureau (IB) official, to pick up his last salary. He has told him he wanted out. But fate had other plans. The IB handed him over to the Special Cell, and on February 9, 2006, along with Qamran (another police informer who was Ali's cousin), they were packaged before the media as Al-Badr terrorists caught in north Delhi. Irshad Ali served his time in Tihar jail. He was then acquitted in December 2016 of charges under the Explosive Substances Act.