It is astounding, however, that not once in their evidence do the police rely upon the contents found in the sealed SIMI offices. It is the ex-SIMI activists that have regularly asked the government and the police to give them a list of items seized from their offices, but without success. In hundreds of cases police have found no neighbours as witnesses, no bank documents, nothing. In case after case, the pattern is similar: The police receive “secret information” from an unnamed informer about a meeting or a suspicious character at a certain location. They reach the spot, search the premises, find “unlawful material” such as pamphlets and CDs on the person or persons present there, and arrest him/them.
No, they failed to record in their station diary (the all-important noting register that is the first record of every police action) the fact of having received the secret information. No, there wasn’t any time to get the mandatory search warrant from a magistrate before the raid. No, they didn’t record in the station diary before leaving their station why there wasn’t time to obtain the search warrant, or the grounds of their information or the article or thing they were going to search for. No, they didn’t make any attempt to get respectable local inhabitants to witness the search as the law demands. No, they didn’t record in their documentation that they tried to get local witnesses but couldn’t. Yes, they brought along their “own” witnesses to attest to the arrests and the seizures. (Often the same witnesses have attested searches, repeatedly, sometimes on successive days and on others, weeks later.) In many cases, the seal used to secure the seized material was not handed to a third person as prudence would require but was simply carried back to the police station by the investigating officer, which straightaway raises the possibility of tampering with the alleged seized articles. There are a few cases in which bomb-making material such as RDX and gelatine sticks, and chemicals like ammonium nitrate — such as in the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts case was allegdly seized. If searches had been conducted as required by law, they would have left a paper trail of supporting evidence. But because the searches were conducted in violation of the law, the only evidence of such a search having been conducted is the word of the police officer.
Once the arrested person is in police custody, he is miraculously struck by remorse a few days later and volunteers “confessions”. The section on confessions is clear-cut in the Indian Evidence Act the British wrote 136 years ago. It says: “No confession made to a police officer shall be proved as against a person accused of any offence.” As recent as 2005, the Supreme Court, while deciding on appeals in the Parliament terrorist attack case of 2001, spoke of serious doubts about conceding the power of recording confessions to police officers. In any case, a confession cannot be forced but has to be made voluntarily. That the confessions by the SIMI accused are fabricated is evident from the fact that in several cases, the police claims that numerous accused are struck by remorse all at the same time and confess to their crimes on the same day and, most surprisingly, in near identical words. To be sure, the minute the accused are brought before a magistrate, they deny having made confessions or say that the police tortured them to sign on the dotted line.
SO THAT’S the comprehensive bank of evidence backing the governments’ claims about SIMI’s involvement in the most monstrous terrorist crimes: confessions and “unlawful material” seized in the most dubious and illegal manner.
