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Charges framed in Coimbatore blasts

Muslim fundamentalists had entrusted the task of assassinating Union Home Minister L K Advani, the then Bharatiya Janata Party president, with a seven-member suicide squad, the chargesheet in the February 14 Coimbatore blasts says.

The charges, framed on Monday morning before Judicial Magistrate S T Tamilselvi by the Tamil Nadu crime branch's Special Investigation Team, names 166 people. While 145 people are now in judicial custody, eight were killed in subsequent blasts and police operations.

Of the accused, 11 were taken into custody from Kerala, three from Andhra Pradesh, two from Karnataka and one from Calcutta. The rest were arrested from Tamil Nadu.

Leaders of the banned Al-Umma -- S A Basha, Tajudden and Mohammed Ansari -- and People's Democratic Party chairman Abdul Nasser Madani are among the prime accused.

Three of the seven members carried "instantaneous-type" bombs tied to their waists. The rest were armed with "throw-type" bombs, the chargesheet said.

The suicide squad set out from the kabaristan, where the bodies of 17 of the 18 Muslims killed in communal violence in November-December, lay buried. They reached the meeting venue at R S Puram without incident, but could not carry out their plan as they failed to penetrate the police cordon. Besides, the BJP leader arrived late for the meeting.

Two of the seven members died in an explosion the following day, the chargesheet added.

Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 250 injured in the blasts.

The 800-page chargesheet said the Al-Umma planned and executed the blasts and related violence as a brutal answer to the killing of 18 Muslims in communal violence, and extensive damage to property of Muslims in November-December 1997.

These, in turn, were in retaliation to traffic constable Selvaraj's murder on November 29.

The chargesheet said the blasts that caused large-scale casualties among Hindus and extensive damage to their property also targeted some police officers and police stations in the city.

It held the accused responsible for committing offences under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Explosives Substances Act, 1908, the Indian Arms Act and Tamil Nadu Property (Prevention of Damage and Loss) Act, 1992.

Although the incidents in November-December 1997 had been the immediate cause, they were really the culmination of a series of communal and fundamentalist violence that had affected Coimbatore in particular and Tamil Nadu in general since 1983, the chargesheet said.

During the probe, the SIT examined 2,245 witnesses. Over 150 people, the majority members and supporters of the Al-Umma and Jihad Committee, were taken into custody.

The chargesheet pertains to only 25 of the total 45 blast cases. The probes in the rest are still continuing.

While Basha and the arrested Al-Umma cadres were lodged in the Madras central jail, Madhani was recently shifted from the Coimbatore central jail to the central jail at Salem.

UNI

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