After eight stolen years, 52-year-old gets rare reprieve from death row

A team of lawyers fought the case pro bono and managed to get the conviction overturned. Now, this Bulandshahr man is trying to rebuild his shattered life

- Himanshi Dhawan

‘I have seen hell. I had lost all hope that I would ever come out alive,” says Momin Khan, seated on a rope charpoy in a relative’s home in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh. It is hard to believe that exactly a week ago, the 52-year-old was in solitary confinement counting the days before he would be hanged. “In my heart I believed I was dead, and the court hearings were all a formality,” he says.

On December 18 after serving nearly eight years of imprisonment, of which six were spent on death row, Momin walked out of Agra Central Jail a free man.

Momin sits in the open courtyard of a single-storeyed, bare brick house with thin curtains instead of a door and a broken floor. It is a safe refuge for now. He is only 70km away from his home in Bulandshahr’s Pilkhana, but the mere mention of his estranged family and the village brings an icy chill in the air.

Momin, his wife Nazra, uncle Jaikam and cousin Sajjid were accused by his relatives — older brother Ali Sher and Ali Sher’s brother-in-law Jaan Mohammed — of killing six members of their family over a property dispute in January 2014. The victims included Momin and Ali Sher’s aging parents and an older brother and his family.