On June 16, Mohammad Umar Gautam received a notice to join an interrogation the next day at Masuri police station in Ghaziabad, Uttar Prade...
On June 16, Mohammad Umar Gautam received a notice to join an interrogation the next day at Masuri police station in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. A resident of Batla House in Delhi, Gautam drove to the police station next morning and returned home later in the night.
His wife, Razia Umar, said he did not tell her much about the interrogation except that the police had asked him about his trips to Kazakhstan in 2012 and 2013, and whether he was affiliated with Canadian Islamic scholar Bilal Philips and Indian Islamic preacher Zakir Naik, who currently lives in Malaysia.
The police asked Gautam to report back to the station on June 19 with a list of documents such as his family’s bank account details and his passport. That day, he left Delhi in the morning but did not return home. His family was unaware of his whereabouts, and police officials did not give them answers except to say that Gautam had “converted 1,000 people”, said Razia Umar, 51.
“We had no clue where he was,” she said. “We had found out through a friend on Sunday [June 20] that he was being questioned by the Lucknow ATS [Anti-Terrorism Squad]. We thought they would release him.”
But Gautam, 57, did...
