According to sources Dr Ahmed was arrested after he returned to the City from West Asia. He was named accused No 22 in the charge sheet filed before a special NIA court on February 20 of this year. The charge sheet calls him an “absconder” and alleges he is a “Lashkar-e-Toiba operative”.
However, the charge sheet is silent on the exact role of Dr Ahmed. It also said that NIA sleuths had no information about his age, address, family background, passport and other details. They only know “he is a native of Karnataka and a doctor”. The charge sheet also states that further investigation was inevitable against all the “absconding” accused, including Dr Ahmed.
The development comes several months after the release of several Muslim youths including a journalist, who had been falsely accused by then BJP government and police of involving in a terror plot to eliminate prominent Hindutva political leaders and some communal journalists. The case has been dogged by controversies since the beginning. The Central Crime Branch (CCB) of Bangalore police had claimed to have arrested 11 youths from Bangalore and Hubli combined on August 29, 2012. Four more youths were also arrested later. The NIA took over the case in the last week of November. Later a few youth, including the alleged mastermind, were released after receiving clean chit from a court. The released youth later stressed they were arrested “only because they were Muslims and their signatures taken on blank papers to extract a confession.”
Dr Usman Ghani Khan, a native of Dharwad, who had also been dubbed as “absconder”, was arrested by the local police in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on the CCB's request. But he was released later as the City police could not provide any evidence against him.
Irshad Ahmed Desai of the Association of Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), which has been representing the defence, said the case was “shoddily investigated and many innocents framed”. “The charge sheet mentions the man now arrested (Dr Ahmed) only fleetingly and the agencies themselves don't have any information about him,” he said.
The APCR was trying its best to trace Dr Ahmed's family. No details, however, were available right now; even his address and where he was arrested are not known yet, he added.
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