Among the 13 Indians accused of having planning and carried out the July 11, 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts, Shaikh was charged with sheltering the Pakistani accused at his Mumbra home. (File)The only tall structure that Wahid Shaikh saw for nine years was the spiralling watch tower from where officials of the Arthur Road Jail kept an eye on the inmates of its Anda Cell. When he emerged in 2015 from it, acquitted of all charges in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case, on the eve of Eid, it was the altered skyline that overwhelmed Shaikh.
Now, in that skyline, he might just spot a poster of Haemolymph, a film based on his life which released on Friday.
Among the 13 Indians accused of having planned and carried out the July 11, 2006, Mumbai serial train blasts, killing more than 200 people, Shaikh was charged with sheltering the Pakistani accused at his Mumbra home.
In 2015, a sessions court found 12 of them guilty, sentencing five to death and seven to life imprisonment. Shaikh was the lone person to be acquitted of all charges. Releasing him, on a surety of Rs 25,000, a court said there was no merit in the accusations levelled against Shaikh. When held, he was 27 and a schoolteacher.
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Originally from Uttar Pradesh, Shaikh’s family had shifted to the Mumbai suburb of Vikhroli when he was very little. The eldest of three brothers, Shaikh did a Diploma in Education, after which he was hired by a well-known educational institution of Mumbai.
Active among his area’s young Muslims, he had frequent run-ins with the trustees of the local Jama Masjid in Vikhroli, who did not ascribe to Shaikh’s adherence to the Ahl-e-Hadees sect.
Shaikh was first held in 2001 after SIMI was banned, and he was booked for being its member. One of those held with Shaikh would later be among the main witnesses for the prosecution in the 2006 train blast case.
“They kept us in jail for two months in Thane. We were subsequently acquitted. However, after that, whenever anything happened in Mumbai, they would call me for questioning. Over a period of time, they filed three more cases against me for rioting,” Shaikh told The Indian Express after his acquittal in the blasts case.
In 2003, he got married to the sister of Sajid Ansari, who was later also arrested in the train blast case. After marriage, Shaikh finished a Masters in Urdu.
Then came July 11, 2006. Shaikh told The Indian Express he remembered the day vividly. “I went to school in the morning (to teach) and in the evening was tending to my 18-month-old son who was sick. I then decided to walk over to my neighbour’s house to just talk, and there saw the news of the blasts on television. The first thing that struck us was the brutality and futility of killing innocents,” Shaikh said.
The call from police came later the same evening. “I felt it would be normal questioning and went. There I saw my friend Amar Khan Sardar Khan… We were questioned and let off.”
Shaikh was subsequently called four times by police and the ATS, questioned and then let off, before finally being arrested on September 29. “They sometimes kept me for up to a week. They would then say they had found nothing and let me go home,” he says.
Khan later testified to police he had seen a few people assemble bombs in Givandi.
In a book called Begunaah Qaidi that he wrote after his release, Shaikh talked about the alleged torture he faced. During his incarceration, he completed his MA in English and later did an LLB after his release.
Shaikh now teaches English at an Urdu school and is associated with the Innocence Network, a collective working for the rights of those wrongfully prosecuted or convicted in cases, especially of terror, as part of which he travels across the country.
In March this year, the state government approached the High Court seeking confirmation of the death sentence of four of the five sentenced to death in the train blasts case. The fifth, Kamal Ahamed Ansari, died of Covid-19 in jail in April 2021.
The other seven have also approached the High Court, challenging their life imprisonment.
Shaikh, who says police continue to visit his home to hold enquiries, particularly after his association with Innocence Network, believes the others held with him should get the same relief as him. “If I have been acquitted, it means that the police story that the Pakistanis came to my house was false. If that story is false, the entire back story also falls through.”
Incidentally, as per per a report published by The Indian Express on October 1, 2015, based on
classified material obtained by it, investigations by police of three states indicated that the 2006 blasts were carried out by a separate group, of Indian Mujahideen operatives.
In one custodial questioning by the Gujarat Police, taped on September 18, 2009, an alleged IM operative, Sadiq Israr Sheikh, claimed to have planted the bombs.
The Maharashtra ATS, which investigated the 2006 blasts case based on which the convictions took place of the men arrested with Shaikh, however, maintains that the conspiracy was hatched by the men arrested from the state.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
