The careful study of a bulky register of a guesthouse in Godhra has added an entirely new dimension to the investigation into the Godhra carnage. The new findings led to the arrest of Ali Mohammad and Ghulam Nabi Dingoo of Anantnag district in Jammu and Kashmir in the last week of October.
The Godhra investigation saga is amazing, and still incomplete.
Initially, the police investigation led to the charge that on February 27, 2002, a crowd of almost 2,000 people, mostly residents of a Muslim-dominated locality in Godhra called Signal Falia, stopped the Ahmedabad-bound Sabarmati Express just as it began to move out of Godhra station, and burnt a coach, killing 59 passengers. Apparently, the mob was incited after some vendors at Godhra station claimed to have been roughed up by a couple of passengers. More than 70 people were arrested.
But the initial investigation left much to be desired, and with little evidence to back up the police charge, many of the accused were out on bail. Moreover, the police were unable to draw the sequence of events to decipher what exactly happened.
Then, last April, a new team headed by Rakesh Asthana, deputy inspector general of the crime branch, criminal investigation department, joined the investigation. Asthana is a low-profile police officer with a reputation for having cracked some big cases such as the fodder scandal that implicated former Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and the Purulia arms drop case in West Bengal.
