UP govt accepts Nimesh panel report; BJP, Cong slam SP

Uttar Pradesh Government today accepted the Nimesh Commission report which virtually let off two Muslim youths arrested in 2007 on terror charges, drawing flak from BJP and Congress which accused SP of treating Muslims as vote bank.
The report, along with the action taken report, will be tabled in Uttar Pradesh legislature during its monsoon session, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav told newspersons after the document was accepted at the Cabinet meeting here.
In its 237-page report, the Nimesh Commission held the STF claim of arrest of Tariq Qasmi and Khalid Mujahid as "suspicious", CPI leader Atul Kumar Anjaan claimed.
"On the basis of the facts, the arrest of so called accused Tariq Qasmi and Khalid Mujahid along with objectionable material on December 22, 2007 at 6.20 AM appear to be suspicious and the statements of the witnesses cannot be believed totally," says the report, Anjaan told PTI.

He said the report has raised a question mark on the functioning of the STF and has exposed its dark side.
Flaying the government for accepting the report, state BJP spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak said, "The government is not looking at things on merit but only acting with an eye on vote bank politics and today's move is just another example of the appeasement policy.

"The report was handed over to the government in August last year but it did not act on it then....Today it took the decision only under pressure of Mujahid's family," he said.
Congress termed as political drama the acceptance of the report by the UP cabinet.

"Had the intentions of the government been clear, it would not have waited for ten months in deciding to make the report public...They neither acted on it nor made it public though it was submitted in August last year," its spokesman Dwijendra Tripathi said.
"The report proved that two accused were wrongly arrested by the then Mayawati government while the SP government, despite announcing that innocents would be released, took no legal initiative in this regard and kept the report under wraps for ten months," he said, accusing both BSP and SP of treating Muslims as mere vote bank.