2004 Jammu mosque attack was in fact Hindutva action: Report

An investigation conducted by noted Kashmiri journalist says that the attack on a Jammu mosque in 2004 attributed to Mujahideen was actually carried out by Hindutva forces, reports an Indian English newspaper. The grenade attack on a Friday prayer gathering at a mosque in Peer Mitha on January 9, 2004, had left two officials dead and 19 people injured. The police had initially blamed Mujahideen, and arrested 108 people. In 2005, the case was closed as “untraced”.

“An investigation into the theft of a police file on a 2004 grenade attack on a mosque in Jammu has gone cold,” the report written by Muzamil Jaleel for The Indian Express said. The report said that in this case too, the Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA) had blamed Hindu extremists, including two held in the Malegaon blasts case and currently in judicial custody. It said that seven years later, NIA had said Rajendra Chaudhary and Dhan Singh arrested in connection with the 2007 Samjhauta Express attack and the 2008 Malegaon blasts were behind the attack and in December 2012, an NIA team had questioned two youth from Kanachak in Jammu.

“In the light of the NIA disclosures,” Jaleel wrote, “a re-investigation was ordered, but it never took off because the police said that the original case file had been “stolen”. Last month, special public prosecutor Rohini Salian had told the newspaper that she was asked to “go soft” in the 2008 Malegaon blasts case by an NIA officer after the change of government in New Delhi.”

Quoting a senior police officer, the report said, “The NIA asked for the evidence that we had collected from the spot immediately after the mosque grenade blasts.” He said that he issued orders for a re-investigation, only to be told that the case file had been stolen from the police station. “A deputy superintendent of police was asked to investigate the theft. No progress has been made since. It’s in cold storage,” the officer said.

PDP leader and puppet Minister for Revenue, Javaid Mustafa Mir, who was minister for power in 2004, was present in the mosque at the time of the attack. He said he knew who had hurled the grenades.

As per the NIA, in a “disclosure statement”, Rajendra Chaudhary had said that in 2001 he had met Sunil Joshi, then a pracharak in Mhow, at Depalpur in Indore district of Madhya Pradesh. “Sunil Joshi… asked me to do something for Hindus and India. I readily agreed to lay down my life for the Hindu cause. … We both came to Jammu by train. We visited Vaishno Devi temple and thereafter Sunilji took me to a room near Purkhu village in Jammu. It was a big ground with a room where two persons, namely Chanderkant Patil and Dhan Singh of Hatod, were already staying,” Chaudhary told the NIA.

The NIA claimed that, in his statement, Dhan Singh said, “Along with Patil, I went to the Masjid. After removing pins from the hand grenades, both of us threw hand grenades on the namazis… After that incident, I along with Rajendra came back to Indore and Patil stayed back.’’