The question of why and how Davinder Singh escaped the radar when Afzal Guru, the convict in the Parliament House attack case, mentioned him as the person who made him accept the crime under coercion remains unanswered.
On October 24, 2001, Muhammad Afzal Guru, the convict in the 2001 Parliament House attack case who was hanged to death on February 9, 2013, in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, wrote a letter to his lawyer, Sushil Kumar, senior advocate in the Supreme Court. The attack on Parliament house, in which five terrorists and nine person, including five Delhi police personnel, lost their lives on December 13, 2001, led to the trial and conviction of Afzal Guru, who was alleged to have provided logistical help to the terrorist in Delhi. He was apprehended in Srinagar and brought to Delhi within a few days of the attack. The trial court, the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court confirmed his death sentence one after the other.
In the letter which Afzal Guru wrote to his lawyer, he claimed that he had been made to accept the crime under coercion. He claimed that the designated court ( the trial court) had sentenced him to death on the basis of the police version of the case and under the influence of the mass media. Most important, the story of how Afzal Guru came under the influence of the then Deputy Superintendent of Police, Davinder Singh(whom he misspells as Dravinder Singh), which he narrates in his letter, is very credible.
Afzal Guru said he was introduced to his senior Superintendent of Police(SSP), Ashaq Hussain of Budgam, through his relative Altaf Hussain, who also acted as a link between Afzal Guru and Davinder Singh. Afzal Guru said in his letter that Altaf took him to Davinder Singh, who asked him to do a “small job” for him which involve taking a man to Delhi and helping him get a rented accommodation. He said in the letter that he had no option but to help the man, whom he did not know earlier and whom he suspected to be a non-Kashmiri. The letter said:”I took him to Delhi. One day he told me that he want to purchase a car. Thus I went with him to Karol Bagj. He purchased the car. Then in Delhi he used to meet different persons and both inside of us he, Muhammad and me used to get the different phone calls from Dravinder Singh.