Lucknow, May 3: A Kanpur youth has alleged that Anti-Terrorist Squad and National Investigation Agency sleuths are torturing him, trying to falsely implicate him in terrorism cases and link him to a suspected terrorist whose "encounter" killing had created a controversy during the Uttar Pradesh elections.
Mohammad Atif, 26, an embroidery factory worker who lives in the Bangali Ghat locality in the city's Jajmau area, has written to the Chief Justice of India, the Union home minister and the director-general of Uttar Pradesh police alleging that the two agencies were summoning him at their offices every alternate day, thrashing him and mounting pressure on him to "own up to" involvement in terrorist activities along with Mohammad Saifullah, the suspected terrorist shot dead by the ATS a day before the last phase of polling in Uttar Pradesh in March.
"The intelligence agencies would be held responsible for any eventuality against me or my family," Atif has written in the letter.
The Union home ministry had lambasted Uttar Pradesh police for "jumping the gun" and linking Saifullah and the March 7 blast on a train in Ujjain to the Islamic State. The ministry had also frowned on the "running commentary" the police had conducted via hourly bulletins and media briefings during the 11-hour "encounter" that killed Saifullah in a Lucknow house.
Many officials in Delhi had then wondered if the overzealous officers had reached conclusions in haste in anticipation of a change of guard in Uttar Pradesh.
Today, Atif held a media conference in Lucknow along with his lawyer, Mohammad Shoeb, and alleged that the ATS and the NIA had made him sign on blank papers.
"The agencies have also taken my Facebook password. I am receiving phone calls from dubious persons from Calcutta and Chennai. ATS and NIA sleuths call me in the middle of the night and ask me to go to their office in Lucknow at 9:30 in the morning. They interrogate me frequently and threaten to kill my wife and newborn daughter if I didn't say I had links with Saifullah," alleged Atif, whose house is close to 80km from Lucknow.
Asim Arun, the inspector-general of the ATS, told The Telegraph that Atif had been on their radar and he had been interrogated earlier too. "But I will be able to tell you the latest situation in half an hour after collecting more details," Arun added.
Later, Manish Sonkar, the Kanpur district-in-charge of the ATS, called up this correspondent "on the direction of the IG" and said: "We had interrogated Atif in the past as well. But the ATS has not called him for the past 20-25 days. We wanted to know his connection with those who were arrested in Kanpur and Madhya Pradesh."
"He is making wild allegations against the agencies because he apprehends that the NIA will arrest him soon. But the ATS is not following him at the moment," Sonkar added.
Madhya Pradesh police had arrested three persons - Danish Akhtar and Atish Muzaffar of Kanpur and Sayyad Meer Hussain of Aligarh - in connection with the Ujjain train blast. Uttar Pradesh police had claimed Saifullah was linked to the arrested terror suspects.
Atif alleged at the news conference that the interrogators had made him sit face to face with a retired air force officer accused of "radicalising" Saifullah and force him to accept that he knew the ex-serviceman for long.
"I do embroidery in a factory in Kanpur where Waqar Anas, a relative of Saifullah, used to work with me. I had met Saifullah there once or twice. But I didn't know him much," Atif said.
Lawyer Shoeb alleged that the intelligence agencies were "cooking up evidence against Atif to implicate him in a case".
A senior police officer said on condition of anonymity that the investigating agencies were interrogating six youths of Kanpur with the aim of getting details on "those who have been radicalised and convinced to act against the country".
"But we have not progressed much," he said.
