He can barely walk. The sleep has forsaken his eyes and so have the reasons for him to live on his broken life.

Nisar-ud-din Ahmad’s life isn’t even a shadow of of what he had 23 years ago. He was arrested on the charge of five blasts on-board trains on the eve of the first anniversary of Babri demolition that killed two passengers and injured eight.

In first half of May 2016, three men walked out of Jaipur jail after the Supreme Court ordered their immediate release by acquitting them from all charges and quashing the sentence of life imprisonment ordered by the lower court.

Though now Nisar breathes freely, it’s out of compulsion and not choice; he believes that 23 years in prison have murdered the man he was.

“I have clocked 8,150 days of the prime of my life inside jail. For me, life is over. What you are seeing is a living corpse.” Nisar told The Indian Express.

Nisar wasn’t even 20 when he was thrown behind bars. Today he is 43. The darkness of dungeons he was thrown in have stripped him of not only the heydays of his life, but also the opportunity to see his loved ones grow old.

“I was yet to be 20 years old when they threw me in jail. I am 43 today. My younger sister was 12 when I saw her last. Her daughter is 12 now. My niece was a year old. She is already married. My cousin was two years younger than me, she is now a grandmother. A generation has completely skipped from my life.”

Here is the chronology of the events which made Nisar and his brother Zaheer's lives a living hell.

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1. Nisar was picked up by police on January 15, 1994, near his home in Gulbarga, Karnataka. He was a second-year student in a Pharmacy course then.

He said:

“I had an exam in 15 days, I was on my way to college. A police vehicle was waiting. A man showed me his revolver and forced me to get in. The Karnataka Police had no idea about my arrest. This team had come from Hyderabad. They took me to Hyderabad.”

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2. Nisar was produced in court on February 28, 1994. His elder brother Zaheer-ud-din who was working in Mumbai as a civil engineer, was picked up that April. “Our father Noor-ud-din Ahmad left everything to fight a lonely battle to prove our innocence. He didn’t see any hope until he died in 2006. Now there is nothing left.”

3. Like Nisar, Zaheer, too, was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released on bail on May 9, 2008 by the Supreme Court on health grounds — he was diagnosed with lung cancer in jail. “I followed the case with singular focus. I kept on making applications to court saying how we have been wronged. Finally, the Supreme Court gave a verdict exonerating both of us and two others,” said Zaheer.

4. Police records link the two to five separate bomb blasts in trains at Kota, Hyderabad, Surat, Kanpur and Mumbai in the intervening night of December 5-6, 1993. The bomb on the Bangalore Kurla Express, while the train was near Karjat Railway Station, was detected by a passenger who threw it out. The Hyderabad Police picked up Nisar, later his brother Zaheer and their neighbour in Gulbarga, Mohammad Yusuf, a car mechanic.

5. Initially, police charged them for a bomb blast that took place in October 1993 in a Muslim educational institute in Hyderabad. This case was registered in Abid Road Police station. They were also booked in few unsolved bomb blasts that had taken place in August and September that year. Subsequently, they were booked in the serial train blasts.

6. Custodial confessions were the only evidences the police could produce against them in court and the provisions of Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) were later invoked to make those confessions admissible. In these alleged confessions of Nisar, Zaheer and Yusuf, the police claimed that Nisar “accepted his role in planting of Bomb in the compartment of A.P. Express on 06.12.1993 and that he was also having two other bombs which were meant for use in K.K. Express on the same day but because of his ill health he could not use them”.

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7. While different state police forces had registered cases in each of these blasts, the government handed over the investigation to CBI.

8. CBI filed charges against 13 more, including Jalees Ansari of Mumbai who was the alleged mastermind behind the blasts in other trains.

9. On May 21, 1996, the Metropolitan Sessions Judge, Hyderabad, revoked the provisions of TADA only to be challenged by Andhra government in Supreme Court.

10. On July 17, 2001, the AP government sought withdrawal of its appeals. Thus the invocation of TADA became invalid in the case where the alleged confession of Nisar, Zaheer and Yusuf was recorded, making the confessions inadmissible.

11. Since Nisar’s alleged confession recorded by DCP K V Reddy on March 11, 1994, was a verbatim copy of another alleged confession of his, taken by police Inspector B Shyama Rao on February 27, 1994 which wasn’t even signed, the trial court in Hyderabad acquitted all accused in 2007.

12. On February 28, 2004, the designated TADA Court at Ajmer convicted the other 15 accused, including Nisar, his brother Zaheer and Yusuf, and sentenced them to life imprisonment. One among them, a juvenile, was later released by Supreme Court in 2012. They approached Supreme Court and challenged the TADA Court’s order.

13. The Bench of Justice Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit observed that the confessions of the four accused, including Zaheer, Nisar and Yusuf, were “without any legal sanction and cannot be relied upon”. Hence judgement was given in their favour.

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14. The Judgement said that Nasir’s “role is neither referred to in the confessions... nor is there any material other than the confession of (Nisar) himself on record. The conviction and sentence of (Nisar) is therefore completely unsustainable”. Regarding his brother Zaheer, the judgment said: “In the absence of any other material on record to lend any semblance of corroboration to the confession (of the co-accused), we find it extremely difficult to sustain the conviction and sentence of (Zaheer) simply on the basis of confession of (the co-accused).” “We were framed. It took almost 12 years and finally Supreme Court acquitted us of all charges,” said Nisar. “I am thankful to Supreme Court to give my freedom back. But who will give my life back?”

Advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan, who defended the five among the accused, including Nisar and Zaheer in the apex court, says that their alleged “confession in police custody is the beginning and end of the case”. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of ten others, including one who is now 85, another is 79 and a third who is 74-year-old.