User:Jaylakhara/sandbox

'Haji Bilal Ismail Sujela' was nabbed by the Gujarat police from near Godhra on March 16. Produced before a railway magistrate and kept in police remand till April 1, he is being subjected to intensive interrogation. Bilal, for the moment, has been insulated from the media by a cast-iron security ring.Top police officers of the state CID and the anti-terrorist squad investigating the case remain tightlipped. "I am sorry, I will not be able to help," says a senior police officer. "Kuch chhapta hai to neta log naraj ho jate hain. (If anything gets into print the politicians get annoyed)," says a junior officer. With little or no information, no one is the wiser about the evidence the police have. What is known is that Bilal and some others, arrested at Godhra, have an unsavoury past and have links with the underworld.On the floor of the assembly, chief minister Narendra Modi speaks of a conspiracy from across the border meant to destabilise Gujarat and the country, even as the leader of the Congress legislature party, Naresh Raval, charges his government with blatantly pursuing votebank politics. The cops on their part, now that the government has confirmed an ISI dimension, have opted to keep quiet rather than make public any details of the investigation, which has been restricted to Godhra. What, however, is known for certain is the shady background of the key suspect, Haji Bilal.Although 62 peopleâ€”all Muslimsâ€”have been arrested under POTO in connection with the Godhra incident, Bilal, a councillor, has been billed as the prime suspect, followed closely by Mohammed Hussain Kalota, the president of the municipality, who has already been dismissed from the post. Two other councillors, linked to the case, are also cooling their heels in jail.Forty-one-year-old Bilal has a criminal past. A rowdy youth who took to picking pockets early in life, he steadily climbed up the crime ladder to eventually emerge both as a local mafia leader as well as a politician.If the Signal Falia slum, in the vicinity of which the macabre act of torching 58 passengers inside a bogie of the Sabarmati Express occurred on February 27, was his bastion in Godhra, the railway station and yard extending from it comprised his entire fiefdom. Besides pickpocketing, Bilal's name figures on police records in numerous offences, including thefts. Sources in Godhra say that Bilal, also fond of gambling, exercised complete control over the railway station, an important junction on the Delhi-Mumbai mainline.The yard was his gambling den besides being the centre for the storing and sale of stolen goodsâ€”belonging both to passengers and the railways. The railways were always his favourite target for pilferage. Bilal is reported to have built up a 400-strong network of urchin-hawkers who peddled their wares on trains right up to Baroda and even Anand. These hawkers on trains are supposed to be his eyes and ears. They passed information and were allowed to hawk their wares in exchange.Bilal's election to the local civic body only served to give a veneer of respectability to an otherwise criminal career, though it did not steer him away from the underworld. Instead, he injected rowdyism into the civic body proceedings. Days before his arrest, he and three other councillors were disqualified from the membership of the civic body for assaulting its president at a general body meeting almost a year ago. Apparently, he and his accomplices had closed all the doors and windows during the meeting, assaulted the president and abused other members, including women councillors. Bilal, according to reports, was a great admirer of one-time Ahmedabad don Abdul Latif, who was subsequently killed in a police 'encounter' in 1997.In fact, police sources say that Bilal played an important role in arranging the safe passage of Latif's second wife Mehrunissa and his brother-in-law Abdul Rauf, to Karachi in 1994, when Latif was hiding there. The two were taken on bogus passports made out in the names of Mahjabeen Sheikh and Kasim Ummar.Karachi-based Latif had come in touch with Bilal through Yusuf Godhrawala, who was also based in Pakistan. Latif had sought a contact for the safe passage of his wife and brother-in-law, and Bilal had moved to make all the arrangements. The latter had, in his earlier years, worked for Hussain Dhatiya, who once ran a gambling den frequented by underworld operators.Bilal, according to some eyewitness reports, not only played a major role in the attack on the train but is also reported to have prevented the fire fighters from reaching the spot. Immediately after the incident, he sped away from the scene on a motorcycle and thereafter boarded a Tata Sumo which took him out of Gujarat into Madhya Pradesh from Alirajpur. Since airports had been alerted to his likely escape from the country, he chose to move to Indore and then Mumbai. Why he chose to return to Godhra after all this is still not clear.