1 month after Jaipur blasts, probe reaches dead end

ROAD BLOCK: Islamic organisations have accused the police of large-scale ethnic profiling.

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Jaipur: The Rajasthan police's investigation into the Jaipur blasts seems to have reached a dead end. The police have even unofficially withdrawn the sketches of the terror suspects they had released.

Islamic organisations are now accusing the police of detaining and harassing several Muslims under pressure to show results.

“The police interrogated me for 45 minutes inside a locked car. The first thing they said was: a Muslim has done this,” says Haroon Rashid, who was detained in connection with the blasts and later released.

Md Azzam, who too was questioned in connection with the terror attack, says, “I was called thrice to a police station, and questioned for 10 hours. They seemed to be hoping that I was involved.”

The police picked up nearly 500 Muslims from the city after the Jaipur serial blasts.

They were interrogated under the assumption that their being Muslim was reason enough for them to know who was responsible.

Islamic organisations say the Rajasthan police resorted to large-scale ethnic profiling in their investigations, even illegally detaining 15 Muslims.

“They are trying to say that Muslims are anti-national,” President, Jamaat-e-Islami, Rajasthan, Engineer Mohammad Salim, says.

“We want them to catch the real culprits, and stop the profiling,” says Gen Secy, PUCL, Kavita Srivastava.

One of the many to be arrested in connection with the case was Rashid Hussein. An IT professional, Hussein works for a well-known software company. But he says the police were more interested in his past than his present.

Although no FIR was lodged against him, Hussein says the police unlawfully detained him for nine days on charges of having links with the banned Students Islamic Movement of India.

“My point is that I was part of SIMI before the government banned it. So that was not anti-national,” he says. “I snapped all links with SIMI when it was banned. I have nothing to do with it now. My worldview is very different from that organisation. I want to work with like-minded people for the development of my country.”

Police say they are continuing their investigations based on the leads unearthed. But in the last month, they have repeatedly gone back on their statements.

Immediately after the blasts, the police had said that RDX had been used but within days, they were claiming that the substance used was actually Neogel-90 (Ammonium Nitrate), an easily accessible chemical which is even used in construction sites.

The seven released sketches of the terror suspects too have now been unofficially withdrawn since no information was received from the public.

And the six sealed cigarette packets of Bangladeshi origin found at the blast sites, which the police had said were crucial bits of evidence, have never been mentioned again.

Muslim organisations, like Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, say that the Rajasthan police have demonised their community in the immediate aftermath of the Jaipur blasts. Police, however, have denied that allegation.

(With Rajesh Bhardwaj)