india

Updated: Aug 31, 2020 17:38 IST

Davinder Singh, the decorated Jammu and Kashmir Police officer who was arrested along with a terrorist on Sunday, has been linked to Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru in various reports.

That link first came to light in Guru’s letter to his lawyers during the course of a hearing at a trial court. It was especially highlighted by Guru’s lawyers who fought against his death sentence in Supreme Court.

The letter, which was used as evidence by Guru’s lawyers, is detailed in Arundhati Roy’s book ‘The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the strange case of the attack on Indian Parliament’. The book quotes the letter to lawyer Sushil Kumar where Guru says he helped one of the terrorists Mohammed at the behest of the Special Task Force (STF) of Jammu and Kashmir police and its officer, deputy superintendent of police Davinder Singh.

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It was Singh, alleged the letter, who asked Afzal to accompany Mohammed to Delhi and arrange for his stay.

“Since I was not knowing the man but I suspected this man is not a Kashmiri, since he didn’t speak Kashmiri,” Guru is said to have written in the letter.

During the trial, Guru never denied his specific role - that he was in touch with Mohammed, one of the five terrorists who was killed in the 2001 Parliament attack. A phone he started using was in contact with the phone that was found on Mohammed’s body, from November 28, right till the day of the attack - December 13, 2001. However, what he pointed out and the court didn’t accept were vivid details of how that phone was provided to him by the STF in Kashmir.

According to Guru, the STF started tortuting him ever since he returned to Kashmir from his failed adventure as a separatist in Pakistan. Telling gory tales of how the STF would pick on people like him despite being a surrendered militant certified by the Border Security Force (BSF), he alleged that he had no choice but to help Mohammed. And that’s why he had helped buy the Ambassador car which was later used in the attack, and that’s how the phone conversations between him and the terrorist Mohammed came to be.

After the car was bought, Mohammed asked Guru to go back to his home in Kashmir. But before he could do that, Guru was arrested from a bus stop in Srinagar two days after Parliament attack.

“My memory is fading but as I recall at one time one time Afzal was being used by the Special Operations of J&K Police. He was made a scapegoat in this case. The case seemed to be an inside job (to me) as there were a number of calls from numbers which the Prosecution suppressed. In that context the letter would support his plea of innocence,” said senior advocate Sushil Kumar, who represented Guru.

Guru also said in the letter that the STF extracted great sums of money from him not to arrest him, as he was a surrendered militant to gave himself up to the BSF in 1993. Roy’s book, however, said that he was detained in 2000 and that’s where he met Mohammed, at the STF camp.