184. The Mysterious Death of Wasim Thajudeen

July 20, 2009. In a Mumbai courtroom, a trial has been under way for months. But before today's witness can begin, the accused has a request. He asks the judge to let him address the court and admit his guilt. The accused is Ajmal Kasab, the only one of the ten Mumbai attackers to have been captured alive. A gasp ripples through the room. Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam objects, but the judge lets Kasab speak. As Kasab recounts the attacks, the gunman who entered Mumbai with a rifle seems to describe more and more of what happened as if it happened without him. This is the story of those attacks, the one surviving gunman, and the lawyer who helped put him to death. This is the story of Ajmal Kasab and Ujjwal Nikam.

On the 26th of February 2011, a young woman’s phone rang somewhere in England, and the voice on the other end said something this woman would repeat, almost word for word, to a friend minutes later, because it frightened her so badly. The caller said he was ready to go to jail for her for twenty-one years. He did not say what for. By then, a car had already been set ablaze and a twenty-one-year-old man was dead, and within two days, three people would be charged with his murder. This is the story of that one car, that one death, and those 3 people. This is the story of Gagandip Singh. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In February 2012, American interior designer Wendy Albano flew halfway across the world to Bangkok. Days later, a hotel employee entered her luxury suite and found the 52-year-old dead on the bathroom floor, strangled and stabbed repeatedly. There was no obvious sign of who could have wanted Wendy dead. But the hotel’s CCTV held one crucial clue: Wendy hadn’t arrived in Bangkok alone. For days, cameras had captured her with a mysterious young man, almost half her age. And just hours before her body was discovered, that man had picked up his bags, walked out of the hotel, and disappeared.

In June 1974, at Royal Ascot, a horse called King Levanstell completed the race ahead of the Queen's own runner. Standing in the winner's enclosure was a thirty-five-year-old Hindu man from a village in southern Trinidad, who had arrived in London fourteen years earlier with nothing and drove a lorry for a living. By then he owned a hundred racehorses and had gone through twenty-four Rolls-Royces. Twelve years later, he was eating dinner at a Denny's near Miami airport when a detective slid into the booth beside him, pressed a gun into his side, and told him to get up and act like a gentleman. Because he was now being charged with double murder. This is the story of that one man, his life and the one afternoon that changed it all. This is the story of Krishna Maharaj.

Every year on August 15, Bangladesh remembers a family destroyed inside its own home. In 1975, soldiers entered a residence in Dhaka and assassinated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family. Decades later, the date was observed across the country as the National Day of Mourning. But on August 15, 2013, as Bangladesh remembered the violence of the past, another home in Dhaka was becoming the scene of a mystery of its own. The apartment belonged to Mahfuzur Rahman, an inspector with the Special Branch of the Bangladesh Police, and his wife, Swapna Rahman. From the outside, there was little reason to pay attention to the family living behind its closed doors. Until the following day, when something inside that apartment brought the police to its entrance. What they discovered would become one of the most unsettling and fiercely debated criminal cases in Bangladesh, raising questions that extended far beyond what had happened that night. This is the story of that home, and the family that lived behind its doors. This is the story of Mahfuzur and Swapna Rahman.