BOMBAY: The mahim police station has gained maximum notoriety for alleged atrocities on persons picked up in connection with the March 12 explosions.
They have equated the place with a Nazi concentration camp and claimed that they were put in to the lockup for days on end without being produced before a magistrate or being given access to a lawyer.
‘The terror is more pronounced in the Muslim pocket of the subure even after the power to investigate the blasts was taken away from the Mahim police station.“ We are afraid to reveal our names because if the police come to know what we have talked they will finish us.” Said a resident who was illegally detained by the cops of that area.
Those arrested said the lockup was literally timed into a torture chamber with over 100 persons packed into a small room, The interrogations they said, would begin after midnight and the policemen were merciless: “They would abuse us tell us to go back to Pakistan. But that was nothing. Some of the abuses hurled at us cannot be repeated,” one victim told this correspondent.
Such horror tales abound. Entire families were taken for interrogation to the detection room and subjected to intense humiliation. Wives and daughters were hit by policemen to pressurize the male members of the family into giving information. Some allege women were stripped before their husbands. “We live in terror. I can’t think of such barbaric things happening right in the middle of Bombay,” a senior citizen said.
Despite his political contacts, he said he had been unable to help the people who came to him. “The police were not willing to listen to reason. They were picking up innocent people and subjecting them to torture,” he said.
People were picked up on such flimsy grounds as having the same first name as the blasts’ suspects the police were looking for. Those who went to the station to enquire about their detained relatives were either not entertained or worse, thrown into the lockup.
Local residents said, even distant relatives of the suspects were not spared, In one instance, a detaince’s relative, who had come from Kerala to enquire about him, was kept in custody for a week. ‘The police later released the two with no case against them.
Then there was this woman who was told that chilly powder would be applied to her private parts if she did not come out with the truth. A businessman said he was witness to policemen having snatched an infant from the mother’s arms and beating her before her child. “It is difficult to believe that I saw it with my own eyes,” he reiterated.
‘The excesses have had a telling affect on the Congress which is now facing a growing alienation from this Muslim dominated vote bank in this suburb, Senior citizens of the area said there was no channel of communication between the police station and the local citizens. Besides they said they had been warned that if anyone lodged a complaint he would be severely dealt with.
Article extracted from this publication >> May 21, 1993
