Past court verdicts proof of Afzal’s guilt
As government’s action on the mercy petition of Mohd Afzal Guru, sentenced to death for the attack on Parliament picked up momentum, a revisit of the judgments by courts at three stages of country’s judicial system had implicitly held that he had played a vital role in helping the five Pakistani terrorists who were subsequently killed by security forces during the repulsed attack.
Special Pota court judge S.N. Dhingra, who conducted the trial and had awarded death sentence to Afzal, his cousin Shaukat Hussain and a Delhi college lecturer S.A.R. Geelani, in his verdict had said “they had helped foreign terrorists and betrayed the land which had brought them up.”
“The act of the accused persons of hatching a conspiracy to attack the Parliament House with the intention to kill the Prime Minister, home minister and taking hostage the entire legislature cannot be looked upon in isolation,” the trial judge had observed in its verdict of December 18, 2002, which came a year after the December 13 attack on Parliament.
But the Delhi HC acquitted Geelani in its judgement of October 29, 2003 finding the prosecution evidence (mainly based on phone records) “inadequate” to clearly link him to the conspiracy and thus gave him the benefit of doubt. In the case of Afzal and Shaukat, HC Judges, Usha Mehra and Pradeep Nandrajog said “the offence is of such a magnitude that the collective conscious of the community is so shocked that it will expect the holders of the judicial power to inflict death penalty (to them).”
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