The Hindu : National : Protest against Zahira

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Nov 07, 2004

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National

Protest against Zahira

By Manas Dasgupta

AHMEDABAD, NOV. 6. Even as the key eyewitness and the main complainant in the controversial Best Bakery communal riot case, Zahira Sheikh, continued to stay indoors in a club resort here on the highway to Gandhinagar, the Gujarat Minister of State for Home, Amit Shah, pleaded ignorance about her whereabouts.

``I am not aware where she is," Mr. Shah said. The matter was between her and the court and the State Government was "not in the picture." The Government, he said, need not "react to her statements, retracting her earlier stand before the Mumbai court," he said.

However, Mr. Shah said, the Home Department had issued instructions to the security officials detailed for her protection to coordinate her movements in consultation with her advocates.

Her sudden change of stand had attracted the wrath of her one-time neighbourers in Ekta Nagar in Vadodara where she stayed for about six months after the Bakery incident. They burnt her effigy in the housing complex compound last evening and described her as a "blot" on the entire Muslim community. Muslim community leaders in Gujarat are both angry and apprehensive about the fate of the Best Bakery case and similar communal riot-related cases after Zahira's volte face. They and other non-government organisations, which had taken up other communal riot-related cases, are worried about protecting complainants such as Bilkis Banoo or Rehanabibi, the key witness in the Ode case in which 27 people were burnt alive near Anand. Plans are on to shift them and such other key witnesses to outside Gujarat, they indicated.

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