Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story has been released and the book speaks in detail about AAP’s ex-councillor Tahir Hussain who has been named by Delhi Police as one of the masterminds and also as an accused in IB staffer Ankit Sharma’s murder.
The book has mentioned Tahir Hussain nine times.
Here’s what the book has claimed, apparently after a ‘fact-finding mission’ by a ‘Group of Intellectuals and Academicians’, which consists of professional women and entrepreneurs, media persons and academicians ‘committed to social justice and nation-building’..
Here’s what it claims:
1) Tahir Husain’s house was used as a bunker and launch pad, Ankit Sharma was ‘allegedly tortured there’
With such elaborate preparations, high-rises were used by snipers in North East Delhi during riots. North East Delhi’s Rajdhani Public School in Shiv Vihar, Khajuri Khas was used by Muslim rioters as a base for storing weaponry and launching petrol and acid bombs, and bricks and stones through catapults. Similarly, the house of Tahir Hussain, an Aam Admi Party (AAP) councillor which is a huge building was used as a bunker and launch pad. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer, Ankit Sharma was allegedly stabbed to death and tortured for hours in the same building.
2) Ankit Sharma pulled to Tahir Hussain’s house
Ankit’s post-mortem report shows 51 injuries. Recently, the investigating police has arrested one Salman as one of the culprits. According to media reports, he has disclosed that he and some other Muslim boys had covered Ankit’s body with a black cloth and they had pulled him to Tahir Hussain’s house. This was the same house from where all the paraphernalia of rioting has been recovered. This was the same house, from whose rooftop petrol bombs were launched and the targets attacked. There were 10 to 14 men were involved in lynching and killing of Ankit Sharma. Salman himself has confessed to stabbing Ankit at least 14 times. His face was disfigured and he was thrown into the Brijpuri nullah.
3) Question about Tahir’s involvement
The gory details of Ankit’s death bring fresh memories of the brave Saurabh Kalia’s gruesome murder by Pakistan forces, whose body had been mutilated in a similar manner during the Kargil War. The incident has raised many unanswered questions. How did the Muslim rioters come to know that Ankit was an IB official? It isn’t usual for a civilian to know the identity of an intelligence official in an area. Then how was it that Ankit’s killers found out? Were they helped by some outside agency? Why was such an inhuman and gory way of killing chosen? Was he murdered at Tahir Hussain’s house? Was Tahir himself involved in the brutal murder? Above all, has such news stopped affecting the society we live in?
4) Riots weapons in Tahir’s home?
Riot weapons were stockpiled over a period of time: There is evidence that high-rise buildings in the area, i.e., the house of former AAP councillor, Tahir Hussain in Khajuri Khas and the Rajdhani Public School owned by Faisal Farroque were used as depots for storing weapons like acid pouches, petrol bombs, etc. Huge catapults of the kind found in Syria were already installed on the rooftop of these buildings. This points towards elaborate preparation for riots.
