By Mohammed Siddique, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad : It took 377 days for a local court in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh to conclude that a Kashmiri youth had come to Madanapalle town with the intention of conspiring and carrying out terrorist activities. The district additional sessions judge at Madanapalle Ganesh Babu has sentenced 38 year old Azad Ahmad Qureshi, a resident of Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir to life imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs 12500 on him.
He has been convicted for treason, criminal conspiracy and securing bogus documents including the voter’s identity card. He was tried under section 120, 121, 121 (A), 468 and 471.
The judged delivered the judgment on Monday, almost a year after Azad Qureshi was arrested in Madanapalle by the local police on a tip off from the Delhi police. While police insisted that his intention behind coming and settling down in Madanapalle were sinister, Qureshi himself claimed innocent. He pleaded before the court that he had come to Madanapalle because his lady love Zarina had returned from Delhi to her home town and settled there. “My only fault was that I loved Zarina and I came here after she came back”, Qureshi said.
The police on the other hand drew attention of the court to the fact that Qureshi was earlier arrested in connection with a bomb blast in New Delhi and served five years sentence from 2001 to 2005. Qureshi, who after coming from Srinagar to Delhi used to sell cloths on the pavement. The police say he came in to contact with the terrorists during his stay in Delhi.
It was after his release from Tihar Jail that he met Zarina and fell in love with her. Zarina returned home in June last year. He also followed her on June 27 last year and was staying with her in area of Madanapale in a rented house.
It was on July 4 that the Madanapalle police arrested him on the suspicion that he was a terrorist and described him as a member of Lashkar-e-Toiba. Though the prosecution did not make any claim of his link with LET before the court, the assistant public prosecutor Shivarama Reddy told the court that Qureshi had come to Madanapalle to conspire and indulge in terrorist activities. Qureshi pleaded not guilty. As he did not have access to any lawyer, the court appointed one Kareemullah as his lawyer.
But Qureshi asserted that he never authorized the lawyer to represent him because he wanted the Central Bureau of Investigations to reinvestigate the case.
Qureshi who spent last one year in district Jail at Kadapa and made occasional appearance before the court at Madanapalle, said he was disappointed by the verdict of the lower court. “I will knock on the doors of the High Court against this judgment. I will appeal to the High Court to handover the case to the CBI’, he told the local media in a written statement.
Since his arrest, his poor family in Kashmir could visit him only once and met him in the court premises with the permission of the judge.
The local people meanwhile were befuddle whether it was a bizarre love story which went wrong for the Kashmiri lover or he was using the woman as a cover for some sinister design.
A Kashmiri’s presence in Madanapalle had raised the alarm because the place not far from the famous Tirumala temple, the richest and the biggest Hindu shrine in South India which figures on the hit list of terrorists. But was it Qureshi’s target. Neither the police not the court had any reply.