Out today, a film on the story of a Mumbai 2006 blasts accused’s road to acquittal

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 planning and carried out the July 11, 2006 Mumbai serial train blasts, Shaikh was charged with sheltering the Pakistani accused at his Mumbra home.

Releasing him in 2015, 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.

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 group of 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 members. 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 of 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 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 he was arrested on September 29. “They sometimes keep me in illegal detention for up to a week. They would then say they had found nothing against me and let me go home,” he says.

Khan later told police he had seen a few people assemble bombs in Givandi.

On his arrest, Shaikh told The Indian Express: “I got into a vehicle driven by a lone constable, who got off in the middle to do grocery shopping and recharge his mobile. This is how serious they were arresting someone whom they accused of being a terrorist!”

In a book called Begunaah Qaidi that he wrote after his release, Shaikh talked about the alleged toture he faced. During his incarceration, he completed his MA in English took on LLB.

Shaikh said he was never in any doubt that he would be released, but that others held with him should have got the same relief. “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.”

Shaikh also hoped at the time that the school where he was working before he was jailed would hire him again.

His biggest regret was the lost faith in the justice system. “I see this city has grown. Skywalks, a Metro, big towers, malls have sprouted up. However, these turbulent changes have had no effect on reality on a deeper level. I see that Muslims are still fearful, isolated and forced to live in ghettos.”