A Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) officer who monitored the surrender of Yakub Memon, convicted for helping plan and execute the Mumbai serial blasts in 1993, had written an article in 2007 stating he does not deserve death penalty.
B Raman, who headed the Pakistan Desk at the RAW, India’s external intelligence agency had written for Rediff.com that in his view, picking Yakub from Kathmandu informally and persuading his family in Pakistan to surrender formed mitigating circumstance to be taken into consideration while reviewing if a death penalty should be implemented.
Raman, who passed away in 2013, had requested the website to which he sent the article, to hold it from publishing. He felt others might escape if the higher court saw that the case has been vitiated as a result of the prosecution concealing a material fact from the sentencing court.
Raman had accounted his moral dilemma about Yakub’s death penalty in the unpublished article :
The prosecution was right in saying that Yakub was arrested in Old Delhi. Yakub was right in claiming that he was not arrested in Old Delhi. In July 1994, some weeks before my retirement, he was informally picked up in Kathmandu, with the help of the Nepal police, driven across Nepal to a town in Indian territory, flown to Delhi by an aircraft of the Aviation Research Centre and formally arrested in Old Delhi by the investigating authorities and taken into custody for interrogation. The entire operation was coordinated by me.
He had also written praising the Mumbai Police, CBI and the IB, for their outstanding success in the investigation and prosecution of the case. But the officer wrote that he was disturbed with the fact that some circumstances were not brought to the notice of the court by the prosecution.
In their eagerness to obtain the death penalty, the fact that there were mitigating circumstances do not appear to have been highlighted.
Raman wrote that Yakub would have undoubtedly deserved death penalty otherwise with his conduct and role before July 1994.
But if one also takes into consideration his conduct and role after he was informally picked up in Kathmandu, there is a strong case for having second thoughts about the suitability of the death penalty in the subsequent stages of the case.
Read the original article written by B Raman, published in Rediff.com here.
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