Days after the July 11, 2006 bombing of Mumbai’s suburban train system, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went on national television to assert that he was “certain that the terrorist modules responsible for the blasts are instigated from across the border.”
Last week, television audiences got to see a different account of events. In a videotaped police interrogation that was leaked to the media, Mumbai resident Mohammad Sadiq Israr Ahmad Sheikh confessed that he and four other men carried out the bombings on behalf of an organisation that has since become well known: the Indian Mujahideen.
Back in November 2006, a 10,667-page charge sheet filed by Maharashtra prosecutors alleged that seven Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives, each paired with an Indian partner, had planted the bombs. Sheikh’s testimony raises the possibility that the unidentified Pakistani perpetrators were in fact five Indians — and, more disturbing, that the Indians now being tried for planting the bombs may have had a peripheral role in the attacks or none at all.
None of the doubts raised by Sheikh’s testimony is new. Back in October 2006, Frontline recorded that “although both the Government of India and the Mumbai Police appear convinced that an unassailable case has been built up, serious questions remain on both the integrity and content of the evidence.” Critics noted that much of the evidence was derived through narco-analysis, a discredited interrogation technique involving the use of barbiturates like sodium pentothal. In their hurry to close the case, some argued, the Maharashtra police investigators had cast peripheral conspirators as actual perpetrators.
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