“Dear PM, the Special Cell is a group of licensedmarauders,” Irshad Ali wrote to the prime minister when he was lodged in TiharJail. Ali’s emotional letter to the PM was a narrative of the harrowingexperience he underwent at the hands of the special cell of Delhi policedespite having worked as an informer for it.
He was arrested in 2006, charged under the ExplosiveSubstance Act and Arms Act, and remained in jail till 2011 when a court foundhim innocent and he was released. Despite the ordeal, some could argue that Aliwas lucky ” Maqbool Shah and Mohammad Amir Khan, accused in separate cases,spent more than a decade of their youth in jails. Both of them had also beenwrongly held without sufficient evidence. Once outside, with little to novocational training, the best of their working years gone and saddled with thestigma of having been jailbirds (terrorists, according to the charges), theyhave floundered in picking up the bits of their lives outside.
There are 16 such cases where people, deemed innocent by thecourt, were arrested by the Delhi police’s elite special cell on flimsyevidence.
A report, titled “Framed, Damned, Acquitted “ Dossiers of a‘Very’ Special Cell”, brought out by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association(JTSA) studied the 16 cases, of which 11 accused are from Kashmir. ManishaSethi, president of the JTSA told Governance Now, “The report is not their sideof story but looks at the courts’ judgment and RTI details. It is tragic andsad that these people lost so much in their lives despite being innocent.”
“Some cases like that of young Md Amir Khan, which was apractically an open and shut case, where the prosecution had virtually no legto stand on, got drawn out for 14 painful and long years,” the report noted.His case was reported in Governance Now (March 1-15 issue).
According to the report, between 1992 and 2012 a largenumber of those arrested were acquitted of all charges by the courts.
