Memon brothers Essa and Suleman outside the Mumbai court on Tuesday. Picture by Gajanan Dudhalkar

Mumbai, Sept. 12: The Memons of Mahim lived in two sprawling sea-facing apartments and partied with celebrities.

That was till March 1993. Tiger Ibrahim Memon, the eldest of Hanifa and Abdul Razzaq’s six sons, was said to be Dawood Ibrahim’s right-hand man and at gala parties the family hosted at Islam Gymkhana in south Mumbai, film stars and cricket heroes were regulars.

Since August 1994, Arthur Road jail has been home to Yakub Memon, a chartered accountant and one of Tiger’s brothers.

Yakub, who at 36 has spent a third of his life behind bars, exploded in court today. “We have seen that for the last 13 years, innocent people have been labelled terrorists. We do not need anyone to protect us,” he raged.

Judge P.D. Kode had declared Yakub guilty of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks. Brothers Essa and Yusuf and sister-in-law Rubeena were found guilty of criminal conspiracy.

Yakub, whose latest bail plea on September 2 on the grounds that he was suffering from depression was rejected, demanded that Rubeena be allowed to go home for a few days to settle her young children — two daughters and a son. She was later granted bail.

Rubeena, 31, is named among the guilty because she asked her father Iqbal Memon, also a resident of Al-Husaini building in Mahim where the family lived, to lend his apartment for Tiger’s “meetings”. Tiger is said to be the mastermind of the blasts that ripped the city and killed over 250 people.

All the Memons had fled to Pakistan before the blasts, investigators say. Tiger, his wife Shabana, his brother Ayub and his wife Rehana stayed back in Karachi — a claim Pakistan denies. The rest returned and were arrested by the CBI on arrival at Delhi airport.

When Yakub was arrested in August 1994, he had on him a Pakistani identity card and a passport. The passport revealed it had been used for travelling to Bangkok, Dubai and Karachi. “My family has no idea about Tiger’s doings,” he had told the media then.

He also brought with him three micro-cassettes of a conversation said to be recorded on May 19, 1994, in their Karachi house that allegedly revealed that the Memons had the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.

Today, Yusuf and Essa tried to console Yakub as he erupted in anger and said the family did not need a lawyer to defend them when the sentence is delivered tomorrow.

Yusuf, the youngest who was in his teens at the time of arrest, is a schizophrenia patient and was released on interim bail in 1998 on medical grounds. Since then, his bail has been extended from time to time.

Essa was co-owner of Al-Husseini building where the family lived and Tiger and his associates held meetings to plot the blasts. He, too, held a Pakistani passport, which shows he had travelled to Bangkok before returning to India.

Newspapers at the time had been abuzz with rumours of a possible soft stand by the government towards the Memons for the “surrender”. Legal experts have pointed out that none of the three brothers has been convicted of an offence that attracts capital punishment, though charges against Yakub are serious.

“The family has always maintained that they were arrested from the Indo-Nepal border,” defence lawyer Subhash Kanse said.