Nearly 14 years after the 2002 Godhra train carnage, the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad on Wednesday arrested the main accused in the case, Farooq Mohammed Bhana.
Nearly 14 years after the 2002 Godhra train carnage, the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad on Wednesday arrested the main accused in the case, Farooq Mohammed Bhana. The train carnage, in which 59 kar sevaks were killed, had led to widespread rioting in parts of Gujarat.
ATS officials said Bhana, who was on the run for almost 14 years, was one of the main conspirators behind the move to burn the train at Godhra station on February 27, 2002.
Bhana, officials said, was a corporator at the time and to avoid arrest had shifted base to Mumbai, where he started working as a property broker.
The Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested Farooq Mohammed Bhana, 55, at a toll plaza near Kalol town.
The Gujarat ATS made the arrest, acting on a specific tipoff, as Bhana was going from Mumbai to Godhra on Wednesday morning to meet his son there. “Being one of the main conspirators in the Godhra carnage, Bhana has been charged in the FIR with conspiracy to put the S-6 coach on fire during a meeting with other accused at the Aman Guest House near Godhra railway station,” a senior police official said.
J.K. Bhatt, IGP (ATS), said Bhana was one of the key conspirators and that preliminary investigations revealed he had gone to Pakistan, probably using a fake passport, immediately after the incident and had then come back to India 10 years ago and started living in Mumbai’s Andheri (East) suburb.
“Bhana was on the run since 2002. He was a corporator of the Polan-Bazar area of Godhra when the incident took place. It is alleged that on the night of February 26, Bhana and others held a meeting at Aman Guest House near the railway station as part of their conspiracy to set ablaze the S-6 coach of the train,” said Mr Bhatt.
During the meeting, Bhana communicated a specific instruction of Maulana Husain Umerji to set ablaze the S-6 coach, for which the other co-accused collected 140 litres of petrol from a nearby petrol pump and stored it inside the guest house, he added.
Maulana Umerji, earlier arrested as alleged mastermind behind the incident, was later released, as no concrete evidence was found against him during the trial. “Those who attended the meeting included one Salim Panwala, who used to do black-marketing in railway tickets, guest house owner Abdul Razak and another corporator Bilal Haji, among others. As decided in the meeting, the coach was set ablaze by a mob of around 1,000 at platform no.1 at around 7.45 am,” the senior police officer said.
As many as 59 kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya lost their lives when the S-6 coach of Sabarmati Express was set ablaze at Godhra station, which triggered largescale riots in the state, in which over 1,000 people, mostly of the minority community, were killed.
