‘Zaheera was paid to flip statements’

Adding another twist to the Best Bakery case, Yasmin Sheikh on Wednesday alleged in front of a stunned courtroom in Mazagaon that her sister...

Adding another twist to the Best Bakery case, Yasmin Sheikh on Wednesday alleged in front of a stunned courtroom in Mazagaon that her sister-in-law and star witness Zaheera had been bribed to change her statements.

She made the allegation during cross-examination by senior

defence counsel Adhik Shirodkar, on the second day of her deposition in the court.

A series of contradictions and omissions surfaced in Yasmin’s cross-examination though, as Shirodkar grilled her on the basis of her police statement and statements she made in a TV interview on a local channel in Gujarat on September 20, 2003, months before the Supreme Court ordered the retrial and transfer of the case to Maharashtra.

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According to Shirodkar, Yasmin had said during the interview that the Best Bakery carnage was a fallout of Nafitullah’s relation with a Hindu woman, Kailash, who had also borne him a male child. She gave a clean chit to all the accused and agreed to state the same in the Supreme Court, Shirodkar claimed.

Yasmin acknowledged that she gave the interview, but denied having said that the accused were innocent.

‘‘The provocation behind attacking the bakery has its roots in marital feud and property dispute and has nothing to do with the riots in Godhra,’’ Shirodkar said, when Special Judge Abhay Thipsay asked why he brought up the TV interview. The defence is expected to air the interview as evidence in court on Thursday.

Shirodkar also brought up statements Yasmin had made in court on Tuesday, that was missing in her statement to the police — recorded on March 4, 2002. ‘‘I had told the police, but cannot say why these facts are not mentioned in the statement,’’ said Yasmin.

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Yasmin said she had informed the police that the accused Jagdish and Chintoo had threatened to rape her by turns, but could not explain why policemen had not recorded this in her statement.

In reply to a question, Yasmin said that Zaheera’s police statement was correct, as was the evidence tendered by her before the Vadodara court. Shirodkar argued that these were mutually exclusive, because Zaheera had implicated some of the accused in her police statement, but then turned hostile and denied knowing the accused before the Vadodara court.

Yasmin had yesterday identified 11 accused in court saying they were members of the mob that attacked the bakery on March 1, 2002.