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The Burdwan puzzles

Who was Karim Sheikh? Whose body was found at the site? Are there holes in NIA story?

Outlook India
Dead men tell no tales. But those they leave behind can, and do. In the case of Karim Sheikh, the tale his family has to tell blasts a cannonball through investigators' claims about the provenance of the October 2 Burdwan blast.
According to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Karim was one of the five people inside an apartment in Khagragarh of Burdwan when a bomb went off in it shortly before noon.
When the local police arrived and broke into the room, they found a man blown to pieces, a youth critically wounded, and another man badly injured. The youth would die at the hospital within three hours of reaching there. A month and ten days later, the NIA said his name was Karim Sheikh,
On November 12, a Burdwan police officer named Gautam Halder wrote to the government hospital, where the youth's body had lain at the morgue since the post-mortem on October 3, that the "deceased has been identified as Karim Sk s/o Jamshed" and that the "dead body has been identified by Jamshed Sk" and, therefore, "the dead body of Karim Sk may kindly be handed over to Jamshed...."
But there's a hitch: Jamshed says he did not identify the body as his son's. "The body had rotted," Jamshed told Outlook this week. "Nobody in the village could recognise it."
Karim had not called or written home since leaving home two months before the blast to find work as a construction labourer in Kerala, he said. "NIA officials came to my house and showed me a picture of my dead son on a cellphone."
When Jamshed told the officials he could not identify the body from the photo on the cellphone, they coerced him into doing their bidding.
The grainy photo on the cellphone showed the head and upper torso of a youth, upwards from a little below the chest. The youth in the photo did not appear to have any wounds.
According to Jamshed and his nephew Amirul, the body that was handed over to them had its chest and face partly blown, as from an explosion. What bothered them was they could not have in any way identified the body they were shown, blast-marked as it seemed.
The picture, however, doesn't seem to match. Jamshed was coerced into taking the body for burial.
The first reports of the explosion had said the youth had identified himself as Swapan Mandal, which would mean he was a Hindu. But police subsequently said the youth had also called himself Suvan or Subhan Mandal, suggesting he might have been a Muslim. Of course, Karim Sheikh was decidedly Muslim.
Inexplicably, police and the NIA questioned the apartment's landlord, Mohammad Hassan Choudhury, for 13 days after the explosion but didn't ask him to identify the dead.
The NIA says the other man to die in the explosion was Shakeel Ahmed. The landlord rented out the house to Shakeel four months earlier. And, as he lives right in front of the building, ran into him frequently.
After building the first-floor apartment in 2010, Choudhury had rented it to some students and then to a security guard. It fell vacant in December. In May-end, Shakeel and a man who called himself Kausar Ali
came to meet Choudhury to rent the apartment.
"Shakeel was fair, had a beard and dressed smartly in pants and a T-shirt," Choudhury recalls. Kausar was clean-shaven and wore a half-sleeved shirt with pants. They said they manufactured burqas and nighties in Murshidabad and wanted to expand the business.
A rent of Rs 4,200 a month was settled. "I set only two conditions," says Choudhury. "Bring your family and sign an agreement." On June 2, Kausar, his wife and Shakeel moved in. Choudhury would run into the two men in the lane outside and have a little chat. "Both had motorcycles and would go off every day."
About 15 days later, Shakeel told Choudhury that Kausar and his wife had left. Shortly, Shakeel brought his wife and three small children. "Shakeel's wife always wore a burqa and hardly ever stepped out," says Choudhury. Muslim women in the locality don't observe purdah. Sometimes, her older children played in the lane. Choudhury never felt welcome to visit them.
In August, Choudhury saw a new man leave the house every day around 8:00am. At times this man — who Choudhury presumes is Abdul Hakim, the blast survivor - would greet him before cycling away. "He was young and had a black beard."
In mid-September, he saw a burqaclad woman, presumably Hakim's wife, ride pillion with him. "1 would ask Shakeel about Hakim but he never gave a clear answer." Ten days or so before the blast, Choudhury began seeing a youth leave the house every day around 7:00am.
This, he now assumes, must have been Swapan/Suvan/ Subhan/Karim.
When the blast took place on October 2, Choudhury was about to shower. He heard the bang and ran out. With others from the neighbourhood, he rushed up the staircase to the apartment. Police would shortly find two women in another room. They were later identified as wives of Shakeel and Hakim.
While not showing him the bodies or taking him to identify the survivor, the NIA asked Choudhury to identify the two women, though he had never seen their faces.
Indeed, the NIA hasn't even asked Hakim's father, who sells clothes on his bicycle in his village in the neighbouring Birbhum district 120 km north, to identify him. "Hakim left home three years ago and worked a cycle rickshaw in Burdwan," his father, Shah Jamal, told Outlook at his home. Hakim had last visited him in March.
Perhaps the most startling testimony is of a man named Parvez Khan, who claims to be a police informer and lives in Khagragarh less than half a kilometre from the crime
scene. He claims he was the first to enter the blast scene with local police officers and had taken the wounded Swapan/ Subhan/ Karim to the hospital. "It was to me he first said his name was Swapan Mandal and then Subhan Mandal," says Khan. "He gave the name of his village as Nairodigi."
Once at the hospital, Khan tied the feet and hands of Swapan/ Subhan/ Karim to the bed posts on the doctors' instructions. "His face was covered in blood, his right eye was blown off completely and there was a gaping wound in his chest," says Khan.
Shown the photograph the NIA had showed Jamshed, Khan said the body in the picture did not have the wounds he had seen on the body. Willing to give his testimony, he claims the police have actually told him to lie low. Khan also insists the critically wounded man was uncircumcised. Karim had been circumcised as a child.
Interestingly, the NIA identified Karim's body only after it arrested a man named Amjad Sheikh, nicknamed Kajol, on November 10.
Kajol's father, Shukur Sheikh, a small grocer in Kirnahar, said his son was active in the SFI, student body of CPI(M).
"My son only had Hindu friends, most of them were from the SFI," Shukur says. Kajol had done his BA at Shambhunath College in Birbhum, and was the cultural secretary of the left students' union in 2007-08. An invitation card announcing a welcome ceremony for freshers in 2008 names him thus.
After failing a test for a government teacher's post, Kajol moved to Calcutta four years ago and found work sticking labels on bottles at a drug company, says Shukur. (According to news reports quoting unnamed NIA sources, Kajol supplied the chemicals for the bomb-making.) Two years ago, Kajol had married. His wife and daughter stay in the village.
Shukur says around October 14-15, NIA officials visited him at his shop to ask him about his son. Kajol's name had begun appearing as a suspect. Shukur says that, fearing for his life, Kajol had absconded from his work in Calcutta. "The NIA officials repeatedly told me they needed Kajol for questioning and would not arrest him."
Kajol came down to meet his father on the night of November 9. The next morning Shukur took him to the NIA.
The agency promptly arrested Kajol and started saying that he is a top functionary of JMB.
The NIA even claimed Kajol "identified" the body as that of his first cousin (father's sister's son) Karim, and "confessed" that he had been responsible for involving Karim in bomb-making.
(Abridged)