Yasmin Ansari

Mumbai, May 3: Yasmin Ansari was in her lawyer’s office even four hours after husband Fahim was acquitted in the 26/11 case.

The 31-year-old, the only member of Fahim Ansari’s family to come to court regularly, was busy with paperwork, knowing well that all her husband’s battles were not done yet.

The good news, Yasmin laughed and said, had reached her home — Bylane No. 2 in Motinagar in the Thane suburb of Bhayander — before she could dial her family. “The family got the news even before I could step out of the court. The TV reporters ran to their cameras for live broadcast before I could even retrieve my mobile from the security to call home.”

Yasmin, who has a nine-year-old daughter, Iqraa, said: “Aaj hum chain ki neend zaroor soyenge, par aagey jung aur bhi hain (Tonight we shall sleep in peace, but there are more battles ahead).”

One battle is at home — that of explaining to Iqraa her father will be back someday. Iqraa spent the day at the home of Yasmin’s father in Agripada, a locality in crowded south-central Mumbai.

“She (Iqraa) did not know anything about her father being in jail till recently. We told her he worked in Dubai. To spare her from gossiping friends in school, I admitted her to a different school after Fahim’s arrest. She has come second in her class and wants to show her father her report card,” Yasmin said.

Asked about Fahim’s alleged confessions to Uttar Pradesh police that in 2008, while working in Dubai, he had come in contact with Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives and had been inducted into the group through the Indian Mujahideen, Yasmin refused to make any specific comment.

A Mumbai police source said that according to Fahim’s confession, he had come in touch with a Lashkar agent in Dubai, where he had gone to work. The agent took him to Pakistan for a 21-day induction programme called daura aam. Later, he also did the daura khaas, a three-month intensive weaponry and explosives training that Kasab later confessed to have undergone.

Yasmin rejected these as “insinuations”. Asked if the police had framed Fahim, she only said: “I do not want to comment about such things. But Fahim is not a terrorist.”

Today, judge Tahaliyani did not mention anything about Fahim’s confessions.

Fahim had also accused three supposed FBI interrogators, one of them a woman, of torturing him in prison. He had said the woman had sexually assaulted him.

Yasmin, a school dropout, had little support from Fahim’s family. She came to court mostly alone, at times accompanied by her father, a retired schoolteacher. Today, for the first time, Usman, one of Fahim’s two brothers, accompanied her, she said.