THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Police in the southern Indian state of Kerala have arrested wife of a top cleric-turned-politician on charges of ordering hijacking of a bus on gunpoint and burning it to press for her husband’s release from jail.

Sufiya Madani was arrested minutes after the Kerala High Court rejected her anticipatory bail saying there was strong evidence for her involvement in the 2005 burning of a Tamil Nadu bus.

Wife of People’s Democratic Party (PDP) chief Abdunnasar Madani and mother of two, Sufiya, 33, is the first woman to be held on charges of terror in Kerala. Police said she would be produced in the trial court in Aluva Friday.

Madani was acquitted last year after spending a decade in confinement in the neighboring Tamil Nadu state without bail. He was charged with plotting the 1998 serial blasts in Coimbatore targeting Bharatiya Janata Party stalwart L.K. Advani in which 58 people were killed and more than 200 injured.

The state government counsel told the court that the police had evidence to prove Sufiya’s links with the youths arrested in connection with a series of terror acts in southern India, including serial blasts in Bangalore.

Sufiya is also reportedly wanted by the police in Karnataka for questioning in connection with the statements by people accused of carrying out serial blasts in India’s software capital. Officials said Karnataka has not sought her custody so far.

“We will act according to the court directives. We have to hand her over to Karnataka if court directs us to do so. We have no role in it,” Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, who claimed that the arrest had boosted the image of the Left Democratic Front (LDDF) government.

Delivering his judgment on her bail plea, Justice KT Shankaran observed that the bus burning was an act of terror involving meticulous planning and Sufiya had played a crucial role in it. He also rejected her argument that there was a conspiracy against her hatched by the police, politicians and the media.

However, the judge praised the role of the media in “exposing terrorist activities” and urged the intelligentsia to be vigilant against the religious extremists. He also rejected Sufiya’s plea to show leniency toward her being a woman.

Speaking to reporters later, Madani also alleged that politicians with communal agenda and the media run by the “rightist and colonial” forces had conspired to arraign his wife in the case and expressed displeasure with the Leftist government that he has been supporting all along.

“The police of the LDF government have been fabricating the case against my wife who is in no way involved in the incident. They manufactured fake witnesses and fake evidences and produced in the court to implicate her,” he said.

He also criticized the judge for being “biased” against a particular community and cited his recent observations on “love jihad” involving interfaith marriages which another judge Justice Sasidharan Nambiar rejected saying it was targeted at a particular community and the” behavior of the investigating officer shocked the judicial conscience.” The special investigation team that probes the bus burning case had named Sufiya as the 10th accused. The case came back in focus when the alleged south India chief of Lashkar-e-Toiba T Nazeer arrested recently confessed his involvement in the incident.

Nazeer was arrested along with his associate by the Bangladeshi Rifles and handed over to Indian security agencies recently. He is being questioned by police in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka in connection with different terror-related cases.

Meanwhile, a court in Kollam acquitted five people accused of attempting on the life of Madani after he pardoned them. Madani had lost his right leg in the attack with crude bombs allegedly by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activists in 1992.

Madani was the founder leader of the banned Islamic Sevak Sangh then. When the case was taken up, the judge could not proceed with the formality of examining the defendants because of lack of evidence against them.

Madani in his statement to the court had said he had no animosity toward them in spite of living seventeen years without his right leg, almost ten years out of that in prison.