ON OCTOBER 21, 2004, MOHAMMAD AFZAL Guru, the convict in the 2001 Parliament House attack case who was hanged to death on February 9, 2013, in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, wrote a letter to his lawyer, Sushil Kumar, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court. The attack on Parliament House, in which five terrorists and nine persons, including five Delhi police personnel, lost their lives on December 13, 2001, led to the trial and conviction of Afzal Guru, who was alleged to have provided logistical help to the terrorists in Delhi. He was apprehended in Srinagar and brought to Delhi within a few days of the attack. The trial court, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court confirmed his death sentence one after the other.
In the letter which Afzal Guru wrote to his lawyer, he claimed that he had been made to accept the crime under duress. He claimed that the Designated Court (the trial court) had sentenced him to death on the basis of the police version of the case and under the influence of the mass media. More important, the story of how Afzal Guru came under the influence of the then Deputy Superintendent of Police, Davinder Singh (whom he misspells as Dravinder Singh), which he narrates in his letter, is very credible.
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