Three men in their 20s jailed till death for waging war against state as defence cites lack of evidence

The additional sessions court in Rajkot on Tuesday sentenced three men from West Bengal to imprisonment for the remainder of their natural life after convicting them of conspiring to wage war against the state, as the defence argued that the prosecution had failed to produce sufficient evidence to support the allegations of the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), while the prosecution maintained that the men had links to Al Qaeda and were spreading disaffection through recovered chats and mosque visits.

The convicts, identified as Abdul Sukarali alias Abdullah Hajrat Sheikh, aged 20, Aman Siraj Malik, aged 23, and Saif Navaz Abu Sahid, aged 23, were arrested from Rajkot on 31 July 2023, where they had been employed as jewellery artisans in Soni Bazaar.

The ATS charged them under Section 121(a) of the Indian Penal Code for conspiring to overawe the government by force, and under provisions of the Arms Act relating to unlawful possession and use of weapons, after alleging that they were in contact with members of the militant organisation Al Qaeda.

According to the ATS, investigators had acted on intelligence received on 26 July 2023 that some individuals were circulating propaganda related to Kashmiri Muslims, and the arrests were made after recovering a pistol, eighteen cartridges, and electronic devices containing messages considered inflammatory.

It was further claimed that Malik had joined a cult called ‘Al Qaeda Tanzim’ through encrypted messaging platforms, was in contact with a person named Muzamil who encouraged him to join jihad, and had persuaded the other two accused to enter the network.

During the trial, the prosecution argued that the weapons, the chat records from a group called ‘Rah-e-Hidayat’, and the accused men’s admissions of visiting certain mosques in Rajkot established their intention to wage war against the state, while maintaining that such radical tendencies indicated prolonged ideological training.

The defence countered that private conversations did not amount to incitement and that witnesses had testified the accused were never heard preaching anti-national propaganda inside mosques, though the prosecution dismissed this evidence as unreliable since the witnesses had only brief encounters at the mosques.

After a one-and-a-half-year trial, Additional Sessions Judge Ikramkhan Bashirkhan Pathan found the three guilty of waging, attempting to wage, or abetting the attempt to wage war against the state, and ordered them to remain imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives.