Mumbai: At 5 am on Tuesday (May 21), a team of nine from the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and assisted by the local Hubballi police, arrived at the house of 34-year-old engineer Shoaib Ahamed Mirza. For the next seven hours, the team carried out a raid and confiscated one laptop and two mobile phones. Around noon, Shoaib and his elder brother Aijaz, both employed at a private IT firm in Bengaluru, were asked to pack a few clothes. Their father, who was home during the NIA raid, was informed that the duo would be taken to Bengaluru.
The NIA, however, did not serve the brothers with an arrest notice as mandated under Section 41A of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Instead, they were given notices under Section 160 of the CrPC, which only empowers the police to require the attendance of witnesses. The witness notice mentions case number ‘01/2024/NIA/BLR’, which pertains to the Rameshwaram Cafe blast case, an incident that occurred on March 1 in Bangalore, injuring over 20 people. On April 12, the NIA had made two arrests – Mussavir Hussain Shazib and Abdul Matheen Taha – from their alleged hideouts in Kolkata, West Bengal. Both, originally residents of Thirthahalli in the Shivamogga district, have been named as masterminds in the case.
Throughout the day on Tuesday, news channels reported multiple raids across different states. At 8 pm, the NIA issued a statement claiming that they conducted raids at 11 different locations in four states – Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The press note mentioned that “electronic devices and documents” were confiscated from “suspects”. However, the press note – released 15 hours after the raid began – did not mention any new arrests in the Rameshwaram blast case.
NIA Conducts Searches at 11 Locations in 4 States in Rameshwaram Cafe Blast Case pic.twitter.com/KjH4PwCAke
— NIA India (@NIA_India) May 21, 2024
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So, were Shoaib and Aijaz illegally taken into custody? Based on how the events unfolded, the details shared by their family, and the notices issued to the two, it appears they were indeed illegally detained. Two separate notices, dated May 21, were served to the brothers early in the morning. The notices, with identical content, stated: “You are hereby directed to appear before me on 21.05.2024 at 17.00 hours, without fail at NIA branch office Bengaluru for enquiry/examination.” The distance between Hubballi (where Shoaib and Aijaz live) and Bengaluru is over 420 km, taking more than seven hours to travel by road. As witnesses, if the two were to head to Bengaluru on their own, it would be practically impossible to reach on time.
The notice served to the brothers.
The NIA has violated the legal procedures that should be followed during questioning or arrest. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasised the need to adhere to the due process of law. Last week, while granting bail to Prabir Purkayastha, a senior journalist and editor of the news portal Newsclick, the Supreme Court observed that the investigating agency must provide not only the “reasons for arrest” but also the “grounds for arrest” in writing. The NIA provided neither to Shoaib and Aijaz.
In the absence of an arrest warrant and the press note issued by the NIA in the evening, the Mirza family has been under significant stress. Shoaib’s wife, Lazina, who is three months pregnant with their second child, said the family waited all day to find out where the brothers had been taken. “If they are not arrested and were needed only as witnesses, why did the NIA take them away like this?” Lazina asked. The family, unsure of whom to ask about the brothers’ whereabouts, spent the day eagerly watching news channels and hoping to get some reliable information. They found nothing.
On April 13, a day after the NIA made arrests in West Bengal, Shoaib was called in for questioning. In a telephonic conversation with this reporter, Shoaib said that the NIA officers asked him about a few names and inquired why his number was saved on their phones. “They questioned me and asked if I knew a few people…probably in their list of suspects. I couldn’t recall those names and I told the NIA officers the same. They let me go after a few hours,” he told The Wire that day.
This is not the first time the Mirza family has been targeted. In 2012, when Shoaib was only 22 years old and had freshly completed a postgraduate degree in computer applications, he was arrested for his alleged role in a Lashkar-e-Taiba module, accused of planning to kill Pratap Simha, a right-wing columnist and former Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Mysore. Aijaz, 25 at the time and employed with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) as a junior research fellow, was also arrested. While five years later, Shoaib, along with 12 others, “pleaded guilty”, Aijaz was released from the case within six months. He was wrongly implicated, but the incident cost him his job as a scientist at DRDO. Currently, Aijaz works for an IT firm in Bengaluru and, like Shoaib, has been working from home since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
After his release in 2017, Shoaib not only secured an IT job but also launched a YouTube news channel called “Ittehad News Hubli”. The channel has close to 6,000 subscribers and over 600 videos. Shoaib was inspired by the journey of Iqbal Jakati, another formerly incarcerated individual who has become a well-known journalist in Belgaum. Jakati, who also faced arrest in a false case, started “Ittehad News” after his release, focusing on socio-political issues affecting the Muslim community as well as other local news from the Belgaum district.
The NIA also raided the residences of three more individuals who were convicted with Shoaib in the 2012 case, as well as the residence of an IT engineer in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh. According to news reports, another team of NIA officials reached Anantapur around the same time as they reached Hubbali and carried out a raid at the residence of retired teacher Abdul of Nagulabavi Veedi in Rayadurg town in Anantapur. His son Sohel, 33, who works as an engineer in a software company in Bengaluru was detained. Sohel has been on working from home for the past three months. The Wire has not been able to confirm if Sohel was formally arrested. Again, the NIA press statement has no mention of having arrested him either.
Among the three individuals with past records are Abdul Hakeem Jamdar, also a resident of Hubballi, and two doctors from Coimbatore – Zafar Iqbal Sholapur and Nayeem Siddique. The NIA issued notices under Section 160 of the CrPC to Jamdar, Sholapur and Siddique, asking them to be present at the NIA office in Bengaluru on May 23.
