S.A. Basha, founder of the banned outfit Al-Umma, died on Monday. He was 84. Basha and 16 of his aides from Al-Umma had been serving life imprisonment in the Coimbatore serial blasts case since February 1998.
Basha was admitted to a private hospital in Coimbatore while he was on parole. The Madras High Court had granted him parole a few months ago, due to ill health, to spend time with his family.
The Coimbatore bomb blast case
In 1998, Coimbatore, an industrial city in West Tamil Nadu, became sensitive due to the Hindu-Muslim clashes after the murder of a police constable Selvaraj. On February 14,1998, hours before senior BJP leader L.K. Advani came to address an election rally at RS Puram in Coimbatore, bombs went off in several parts of the city, killing 53 people and injuring 231 people. One of the bombs at RS Puram went off just minutes before Advani could reach the venue.
Basha is the architect of the serial bomb blasts. The investigation was first carried out by the Coimbatore city police and was later transferred to the CB-CID’s special investigation team. The investigation found Basha guilty and he was lodged in the Coimbatore Central Prison for more than 25 years.
The chargesheet in the 1998 bomb blast case was filed in 1999 accusing Basha as the mastermind behind the deadly blast. He was accused of plotting to assassinate Advani using a suicide squad using 650 kilos of gelatin. The chargesheet said that Basha got gelatine and other explosives from Mysore to make the bombs and the IEDs.
The investigation identified 166 suspects in the case, following which 158 people were convicted by the special court. Of them, 43 including Basha were sentenced to life imprisonment. Later, the Madras High Court upheld the sentence of 17 convicts in the case and acquitted 22 others. When all the 17 convicts chose to appeal in the Supreme Court, Basha did not go on an appeal. One of the convicts died during the course of the Supreme Court hearing, while Basha and others stayed in the prison. Basha’s death, however, will not bring an end to the blast case. The other convicts in the case are still in prison.
Basha’s final rites were performed on Tuesday evening. His body was taken in a funeral procession from South Ukkadam to the Hyder Ali Tippu Sultan Sunnath Jamaath Masjid at Flower Market in North Coimbatore amidst high security.