New Delhi--He was 23, had just qualified to become a doctor, and was the pride of his doting parents. Then, at around 4 pm on February 6, 2008, a knock on the door changed everything.
“I spent seven years in hell. They stole the best years of life. I want to live now, I want my life back,” Allah Baksh Yadwad told The Sunday Express.
On April 30, Yadwad was acquitted by a Hubli court of all charges leveled by the Karnataka Police which claimed he was a member of a “SIMI module” and had participated “in conspiracy meetings aimed at… establishing (an) Islamic government in India”.
But a copy of the judgment said it all: the prosecution, relying on Investigating Officer S S Khote, lined up 45 witnesses — including 24 medical students — to prove Yadwad’s guilt, but none of them supported the police version.
In the end, the judgment devoted 39 paragraphs to illustrate Yadwad’s innocence.
‘There was not a shred of evidence with police, they framed my son,” said Yadwad’s 57-year-old father Waliullah who had to undergo bypass surgery following a heart attack four months after the eldest of his six children was picked up that February afternoon.
As in the story of Bangalore-based software engineer Yahya Kammukutty, whose acquittal in the same case was reported by The Indian Express on Wednesday, Yadwad’s arrest was the result of a sequence of events that started with the confiscation of a motorcycle without papers from two youths in Honnali.
One of the two, Mohammad Asif, was a student at Karnataka Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) in Hubli. At the time, Yadwad was half-way through his one-year house-surgeoncy, following his MBBS degree, at KIMS.
Police went on to link Yadwad to Asif, who they alleged had conducted mass prayers, violating rules, at the KIMS hostel.
Yadwad alleges that after he was picked up from his home in Hubli, he was threatened, slapped and made to sign on eight blank sheets of paper by police.
Indian Express
