By Adnan Ali, Aqib Nazir And Huda Ayisha
New Delhi: “There is not a single piece of evidence on the record to point out towards the accused persons, as members of the riotous mob behind the incident,” read a local court’s judgment while acquitting six men on 2 August 2024, four years and five months after they were accused of rioting and arson.
Article 14 spoke to four of them—Hashim Ali (58), Abu Bakar(28), Mohammad Azeez (28) and Najumuudin (28)—who lived in Shiv Vihar colony in northeast Delhi, where communal violence raged from 24 February to 25 February, killing 53 people, three-quarters of them Muslim.
They were among over 180 people found innocent during trials over four years after the riots.
Article 14 reported in 2021 that Delhi judges have described the cases following the riots as “absolutely evasive, lackadaisical, callous, casual, farcical, painful to see, and misusing the judicial system.”
In May 2024, Article 14 reported that when discharging a case of rioting, criminal conspiracy and destruction of public property during the 2020 Delhi riots against 11 Muslim men, a judge found that the police had “artificially prepared” the case, using planted witnesses and concocted statements to frame nine of them.
In another Delhi riots case we have reported on that appears to be built on spurious evidence, 13 Muslim women identified as taking part in a protest against India’s citizenship law in February 2020 by a secret police informer months after the violence gave more or less identical statements against Gulfisha Fatima, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, three students activists whom the Delhi police have accused of conspiring to cause the Delhi riots.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
