Black Friday Preview

Friday, 12th March, 1993 - A black spot in the history of India.

The day which shook the world when bombings took place in Mumbai.

9th March, 2003 - 3 days before the bombs exploded across the financial capital of India, a man called Gul Mohammed had confessed at the Nav Pada poilce station about the blasts. His warning wasn't paid any heed and on 12th March, the unthinkable happened while taking away 300 lives.

Investigations began and soon an abandoned vehicle filled with explosives and weapons was found. Further it was also found that the vehicle belonged to one Rubina Memon, who was the sister-in-law of Tiger Memon [Pawan Malhotra], a man who had a criminal record of being a smuggler and was a resident of Mahim, Bombay. Soon Asgar Muqadam, Tiger Memon's secretary, was in police net and confessed to knowing about the proceedings to the bomb blasts.

Mumbai police added on to the heat with an intense investigation that went for an entire month of March and April. Inspector Rakesh Maria was the man in charge and together he and his team went all around Mumbai while locking up suspects like Mushtaq Tarani, Parvez Shaikh, Abdul Ghani Turk, Imtiaz Ghavate, and Shoaib Ghansare. There were many more to be caught though, notably being Javed Chikna, Anwar Theba, Bashir Khan, Iqbal, Farooq Pawle, Irfan, Tainur, Shahnawaz, Babloo, Moin, Naseem, Zakir, Firoze, Mehmood and Badshah Khan.

Badshah Khan [Aditya Srivastava], who was a part of the entire conspiracy and had gone into a hiding after the blasts. Waiting for a word from Tiger, his run from the police came to an end as he got arrested at his village in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh on May 10, 1993. On questioning, he revealed that the bombing was carried out as a revenge for the atrocities suffered by the Muslim minority community during the December 1992 and January 1993 Bombay riots.

Story started unfolding about the actual reasons behind the bombings. Between Dec 1992 and Jan 1993, there were Hindu Muslim riots that had hit the city of Mumbai. One such sufferer was Tiger Memon whose office was burnt. Later underworld leaders in Dubai started devising ways to hit back in retaliation and Tiger Menon came up with an idea of an attack on Mumbai.

Meanwhile the city was still not considered safe since investigation revealed that there was a large amount of unused RDX explosive kept somewhere. Yeda Yaqub Khan was the man who knew about its whereabouts and after his family comprising of his brother and sister-in-law were arrested by the police, he ran for a while, only to surrender to the police. He turned into police witness and told them about the origin of explosives being Pakistan.

In the meantime Badshah Khan too decided to become a police witness and rattled down an entire chain of events that led to the blasts. From smuggling of the explosives to the training in Pakistan to his first meeting with Tiger Memon, he told the police all what they wanted to know. With such information in hands, the police filed a charge sheet against 189 accused on November 4, 1993 while CBI took over the case henceforth. A few months passed by and Tiger's brother, Yaqub Memon, too surrendered to the authorities on August 5, 1994.

Anurag Kashyap's much cherished dream of showcasing on the big screen about the series of events that happened and the entire drama that unfolded is finally being realized as his 'Black Friday' gets set for a February release. The film is based on a book by S. Hussain Zaidi and is presented in a docudrama format.