BOMBAY, 4 September 2006 — A hard core Pakistani militant and alleged commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba Akmal Hashmi, who was arrested by the Rajputana Rifles in Kashmir on Aug. 23, was brought to Bombay by officials of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) of Maharashtra police on Saturday evening. He was charged with conspiracy and produced before a holiday court yesterday afternoon. The court sent him to police custody till Sept. 13. The accused becomes the 10th arrested in the blasts case.

Claiming a major breakthrough in the July train blasts in Bombay, the police said that Hashmi hailed from the Punjab province in Pakistan and had also worked there as a a police constable. Akmal Hashmi, alias Abu Ahmed, is a divisional commander of the little known militant group Al-Badr.

“Hashmi is one of the key suspects in the July 11 blasts. He is the first accused to be arrested in connection with the Mahim blasts and the 10th accused to be arrested in connection with the July 11 blasts,” said ATS chief Krish Pal Raghuvanshi.

“Hashmi was arrested by the army in Jammu and Kashmir and was interrogated there during which he reportedly revealed that he had knowledge about the LeT plan of carrying out serial blasts in suburban trains in Bombay on July 11,” he said.

The Al-Badr militant, however, denied any direct role in the Bombay blasts. “I had no hand in the Bombay serial blasts. I have no intentions of lying. I got to know that there were 16 men, some from Kashmir and some from Pakistan,” Hashmi told reporters in Bombay yesterday.

The ATS believes that one of the blast victims, whose body is still lying unclaimed at a Bombay hospital morgue, could possibly be a suicide bomber.

“Though Hashmi claimed that the LeT had dispatched 17 operatives to Bombay to execute the plan and 16 returned to the Kashmir Valley after carrying out the seven simultaneous bomb attacks, sources in Kashmir police said that his testimony was highly unreliable,” a senior ATS official connected with the blasts probe told IANS.

“After initial interrogations, they found nothing linking him to the July 11 attacks. He also claims that though he had the knowledge of the blast plans, he himself had no hand in the serial blasts,” the ATS official pointed out.

“A decision on whether Hashmi would be booked in the case or any other legal action initiated against him would be taken after his interrogation,” Raghuvanshi said.

“Hashmi will be interrogated by an Anti-Terrorism Squad to ascertain whether he is involved in July 11 blasts,” the ATS chief added.

Meanwhile, two of the nine other Bombay serial blasts accused — Kamal Ahmed Sheikh and Tanvir Ansari — were taken to Bangalore yesterday for conducting a series of scientific tests on them, ATS sources said.

Lie detector, brain mapping and narco tests would be conducted on the duo at the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore today.

ATS believes that the two men have information on the blasts that took place at Matunga, Jogeshwari and Khar in northwest suburban Bombay.

Ansari is a doctor of Unani medicine and Ahmed, believed to be a key suspect, was held in Bihar.

— With input from agencies