Jan
26
Gujarat updates
January 26, 2005 | Comments Off on Gujarat updates
Zaheera Sheikh, the main witness in the Best Bakery trial, has told the court that she doesn’t know how or when her sister Sabeera died. According to the prosecution, Sabeera died in the attack on Best Bakery the nights of March 1 and 2, 2002 during the pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat.
She said she came to know of her sister’s death at the hospital on March 3, ‘02, a day after she and her family members were rescued and taken to hospital.
The prosecution, however, put to her the previous statements where she had given the cause of Sabeera’s death as the fire started by the mob. She had accepted then that her sister died during the fire.
Zaheera’s examination has now gone on for over ten days, and she has not yet been examined by the defense. She was declared a hostile witness on December 21, 2004, after she recanted her earlier statement given to the police.
In news relating to the 2002 Godhra train fire, Justice Nanavati, who heads the commission probing it, said that the U.C. Banerjee commission’s interim report describing the fire as an “accident” was not the final word, and that the incident could have been a terrorist act.
“As a report prepared by a retired Supreme Court Judge, we will certainly give it weight, but it cannot be conclusive. We will have to take into account the evidence provided by several witnesses before we can give our report on what happened in Gujarat,” Justice G.T. Nanavati told NDTV.
A five-member delegation from the New York City Bar Association is in Gujarat to study human rights violations of those detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA).
The delegation comprises Justice Jed Rakoff, federal district court judge for the southern district of New York, Gerald P. Convoy, Deputy Commissioner in the office of the Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School district, Mamta Kaushal and Anil Kalhan, non-resident Indians practising law, and another advocate Sam Scott Miller.
The delegation met with lawyers and spoke to the families of those detained under POTA. Some family members said that although the United Progressive Alliance Government repealed POTA, those detained before the repeal were not helped.
The Aman Samuday and the Jan Sangharsha Manch arranged the meetings. They are arguing the cases of the victims of the Gujarat pogroms before the G.T. Nanavati and K.G. Shah judicial inquiry commissions.
According to the Manch convenor, Mukul Sinha, repeated appeals to the UPA Government to repeal the Act with retrospective effect had fallen on deaf ears.
The Manch and other human rights activists in the country had now requested the Centre to at least drop Section 32 of the POTA under which the “so-called” confessional statements made before the police were treated as conclusive evidence.
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