Bengaluru teen's jail ordeal ends after 90 days

Bengaluru: In a clear case of mistaken identity, a 19-year-old student from Murudeshwar was wrongly imprisoned, for over 90 days, at a jail in Cooch Behar in West Bengal for allegedly kidnapping a girl. The youth reached Bengaluru on July 15, after he got bail on July 11.

The father of the kidnapped girl had filed a habeas corpus at the Kolkata High Court, which prompted a CID team from Cooch Behar to come to Honnavar and arrest Sameer Ahmed Henikar, the PU student. According to the CID sleuths, the kidnapped girl’s father had alleged that his daughter spoke to him from Sameer's phone number after she was abducted and kept at an unknown place.

It took three months for the police and the court to grant Sameer bail for want of any evidence. The Cooch Behar police are now investigating whether the phone number was cloned, which may have led to this mix up.

A resident of Roshan Mohalla, Sameer was on April 4 picked up by a team of policemen from his house on the pretext of an inquiry. They later took him to the station where he was handed over to West Bengal CID sleuths. Sameer had finished his PU exams and was awaiting results.

The officials arrested Sameer despite repeated plea from his family members that he was innocent. They took him to Cooch Behar and remanded him to judicial custody.

Narrating his ordeal Sameer, the youngest son among the eight children of Ahmed Abul Henikar, a visually impaired man, said the police showed him a photograph of a girl and asked about her whereabouts. “When I told them I do not know anything about it, they told me that the girl has been kidnapped and the father had received the call from my phone number and she had spoken to him,” Sameer told DC.

“The police also told me that the kidnappers had even spoken to girl’s father in Bengali, but I told them I cannot speak or understand the language,” Sameer added. However, the police felt that I was part of the kidnappers. They questioned me if I knew few names that they said, which I refused to identify. After probing for over 90 days, the police finally submitted chargesheet based on which Sameer got bail.

Sameer said that the mobile phone and a SIM card belonged to his brother, who left to Dubai a year ago after handing over his phone to him. “I was using the phone very rarely. Before I was arrested, I had received around six calls from a person who was speaking in Bengali. Initially I used to disconnect the calls, but since he used to repeatedly call me, I once sent a message to him ‘who are you?’ The person replied in Bengali which again I could not understand and did not bother to know what it was it all about,” Sameer told DC. However Sameer got a shock of his life, when the police approached him.

Sapna Ghosh, a CID official who secured his custody, said the arrest was made on the basis of a habeus corpus filed by the girl's father. “After a detailed questioning, I realised that it could be a case of SIM cloning and submitted before the court that Sameer was not involved,” she added. Sameer has approached Movement for Justice, an NGO, which will take up his case with the State Human Rights Commission.