Is Biswanath Halder insane?

If Biswanath Halder could decide his own destiny, he would not be in a Cleveland Court attending a pre-trial hearing about his sanity. He would rather be seeing a man he calls his mortal foe being tried instead.

He has been attending hearings most of the week in which a psychologist has been trying to convince the judge that Halder is indeed capable of understanding the proceedings against him and that the previous psychologists who said he could not do so were plain wrong. If Judge Peggy Foley Jones will agree with the third psychologist, she could set a trial date within a few weeks.

Halder is charged with 338 counts including aggravated murder and holding more than 100 people -- students, professors and university workers -- hostage. Most of the charges come under the anti-terrorist legislation the state of Illinois had passed after 9/11 and pertain to holding people hostage in state-run buildings and institutions.

Halder, 64, who is facing death sentence if found guilty, has been conducting a campaign from his jail cell. The person who should really be tried, he wrote to rediff.com, is Shawn Miller, his mortal foe, who reportedly hacked more than two years ago Halder's Web site that posted radical literature against America and its foreign policy. Halder had sued Shawn Miller and lost the case.

He had accused Miller of  "destroying my life's work," claiming the Web site was to be "a catalyst for trillions of dollars of economic activity for Indian businessmen."

A few weeks after a federal judge dismissed the suit, Halder went on a shooting spree. He reportedly believed that if Miller, who worked for Case Western, was not brought to justice evil will flourish in the world. But the young man who was allegedly shot dead by Halder did not have anything to do with Miller, and he was not even anywhere near Miller.

The campus cameras have captured, according to the officials, every scene in the seven-hour long siege on May 9  2003.

Recounting her interviews with Halder, Dr Barbara Bergman told the court, according to the documents, that Halder had recalled extensively how he had donned a wig and helmet and dressed in a jacket on the way to the shooting site.

The whole deadly episode was the university's fault, he had reportedly told her because the alleged hacker was employed by the school and Case Western had failed to bring him to justice.

The university "wanted violence," she remembered Halder telling her.

Halder, who has a battery of court appointed lawyers, has not been happy with them. Several of them have quit unable to handle him, calling him delusional, and they want him to be certified incompetent to go through the trial. Several months ago, Halder had contacted few journalists, offering to tell them his side of the story. But he had one or two conditions. There should not be any protective partition between him and the reporters, he had written.

Halder has also been writing to the media that he has no confidence in the lawyers and they are working for the prosecution. He wanted them to post on a Web site the content of his civil suit against Miller but they refused.

Bergman readily admitted Halder's thinking was "wacky" but he is far from being insane, she said.

"This is a disturbed person," Bergman had said in the court earlier. "But it is not because he's mentally ill."

He is "just silly," she asserted.

The previous two psychologists who had evaluated Halder had concluded that though he might understand the process, he is too disturbed to help in his defence.