When Syed Nazakat joined UPIU’s mentoring team in early 2010, he came with an impressive resume. What most caught our attention was his slot as a finalist for the 2010 Daniel Pearl Award, which honors cross-border investigative reporting.
Nazakat discovered a prison system that Indian officials said was loosely based on U.S. facilities in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, pictured here on July 8, 2010. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg
Nazakat was honored for two stories he wrote for India-based The Week magazine, about a chain of secret interrogation centers integral to India’s rendition program for terrorist suspects. The stories, “India’s Secret Torture Chambers” and “Top Secret,” created serious waves in India and beyond. (You can read the first story on Nazakat’s blog.)
It wasn’t easy to report and write the stories, Nazakat admits. Want to find out how he did it? He shares below, in his own words, what it took to take the story from an editor’s hunch to publishing the first story, “India’s Secret Torture Chambers.” (He’ll share more about the second story, “Top Secret,” in a future post.)
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Nazakat: It was in one of our editorial meetings that we discussed the possibility of secret detention and interrogation facility (facilities) in India. We knew that the government has been intensifying its anti-terrorism efforts to combat the threat. Many people had died in the police custody and some had disappeared. My editor wondered: Was it possible that India’s is running a secret program to hold suspected terrorists?
When I began investigating, I had no idea how it might be possible to break this story. Even though I have been reporting on security and terrorism=related issues for many years, and have a wide network of contacts and sources, I had no idea how difficult a task it would prove to do the story. I traveled for days from one place to other without success. Then, I went to the courtrooms and began questioning dozens of people from different place of India. I met officials in the police anti-terrorism branch, but they expressed ignorance about any such facility. I contacted human rights activities and lawyers. I also approached India’s national human rights commission for help.
That organization promised to check with its wide network of human rights centers across India. A few weeks later, they called and said according its knowledge and investigation no such facility exists in India.
Finally, I heard of Parvez Ahmed Radoo, a young boy from Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir who was picked by the police from the Delhi airport and illegally detained and interrogated inside a secret torture chamber in the city. I managed to get Parvez’s flight itinerary from an airline company, which confirmed that he was arrested from the Delhi airport. I traced his family, and through them I managed to get a letter from Pervazi from inside prison in which he gave chilling details how he was arrested from airport, taken to secret interrogation center and detained for over a month. In his letter, he spoke of other boys who were detained at the facility.
His case gave us the first clue, and eventually led us to other people who have been detained and interrogated in secret torture chambers across India. I narrowed down my research and conducted a series of interviews in the next five months, with many people who never have spoken publicly before and others with firsthand knowledge of these facilities. Officers involved in the secret program admitted that extreme physical and psychological torture, based, they said, loosely on the regime in Guantanamo Bay, was used to extract information from the detainees. It includes sleep deprivation, keeping prisoners naked to degrade and humiliate them, and forcibly administering drugs like pethidine through the rectum to further break down their dignity. Many detainees disappeared after they were picked by Indian intelligence and security agencies. Lawyers in Indian administered Kashmir alone have filed 15,000 petitions since 1989 to seek whereabouts of the detainees.
The family members of the suspected terrorists were reluctant to speak. Some desperately sought some means of reassuring that we were real journalists and not police agents. It was also enormously difficult to get any kind of access to people who had been involved on the official side, the people who operated these facilities. But then some brave police officers, disturbed by existence of these illegal facilities, spoke to us about these black sites. Through a series of interviews, the story managed to establish that the Indian government was running secret facilities around the country to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists. The story revealed for the first time how India is running a network of secret facilities around the country to hold and interrogate terror suspects including minors. The interrogation techniques have led to questionable confessions and the deaths of many detainees.
The story prompted immediate attention of the Indian government. A day after the story was published India’s home ministry tasked a team to do an internal investigation into these illegal facilities. The issue also reached the Indian Parliament. On July 23, 2009, Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram told the Indian Parliament that he is looking into The Week’s report on the Secret torture chambers and said, “If there is any evidence that any State Police is keeping a secret ‘torture cell’, you have my word that we will come down heavily and stop this practice.”
India’s National Human Rights Commission praised our work and the human rights bodies decided to use the article in the court as evidence that many innocent men were implicated in wrong cases by the police.
