PUNE, 5 August 2006 — The Manmad police in Nasik district last night arrested eight associates of Arif Lakhani, an alleged Pakistani spy who was nabbed on Wednesday at the Manmad railway station. The police, maintaining a veil of tight secrecy, did not reveal the names of the arrested, but alleged that they had seized several top-secret military documents from them.
A police source said that a key associate of Lakhani, who the source identified as Bunty Jahagirdar, was nabbed in Shrirampur town of Ahmednagar.
Jahagirdar, a hardcore criminal, was also jailed for some time in connection with the Ghatkopar bomb blasts and was also interrogated by the local police in Ahmednagar after the July train blasts.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Shiv Sena, Patit Pavan Sanghatana and Bajrang Dal activists held demonstrations in front of Lakhani’s provision shop, which was forced to close down due to the protests.
The Jammu and Kashmir police, meanwhile, arrested a suspected activist of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group in connection with the July 11 train bombings in Bombay that killed more than 200 people.
This is the first arrest to be made in the Bombay blasts case from Kashmir and the 11th overall.
Local police said LeT operative Abdul Hameed, 35, was arrested on Thursday from Poonch district. “He was working as a guard in a security agency in Bombay for the last one-and-a-half years and had fled the city soon after the blasts,” a police official, who requested anonymity, told a news agency. The police official added that Hameed was handed over to a team from the Bombay police.
Hameed was tasked to set up a terror network in Bombay and was part of the LeT module deployed in Bombay, the PTI news agency quoted police sources as saying.
Another news agency reported that Hameed was held on suspicion that he had knowledge of the attacks after police found his identity card at one of the seven blast sites. Police said he was preparing to leave for Saudi Arabia shortly for a new job. “It is too early to comment about his involvement,” a senior intelligence officer told Reuters. Hameed has been sent to police custody for four days.
Security agencies suspect LeT to have carried out the carnage in Bombay. They say that the LeT has spread its operations to other parts of India and has several “active and sleeper” modules in major Indian cities.
Police believe the LeT and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) played a role in the Bombay bombings. Both have denied involvement.
So far 11 people have been arrested in connection with the bombings. All the arrested are Indian Muslims. They include a Bombay-based Urdu journalist, a software professional and an alleged LeT commander.
In Nashik, Shabbir Ahmad Mashallah, 32, was arrested on Thursday night by officials of the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra police from the Fish Market locality in Malegaon on charges of being associated with SIMI. Mashallah was taken to Bombay for interrogation.
Nihal Nachan and Saif Nachan, the two Thane-based Indian Muslims, were arrested from Padga town for their connections with SIMI. Nihal and Saif were produced before a court, which remanded them to police custody till Aug. 17. The ATS told the court that both Nihal and Saif were promoting SIMI activities and that the police had seized incriminating material from them.
According to an ATS official, the arrests of Nihal and Saif may not be linked directly with the train bombings.
Feroz Deshmukh was arrested from Pune by the ATS following the interrogation of alleged LeT Bombay chief Faisal Shaikh. ATS sources said that Feroz, a resident of Aurangabad, was arrested in connection with arms haul in Aurangabad, which included 40kg of RDX, 17 AK-47 assault rifles and 50 hand grenades.
In a dramatic twist to Deshmukh’s arrest, well-known dawa worker Zakir Naik’s Islamic Research Foundation (IRF) in Dongri suburb of Bombay has come under the scrutiny of the ATS, federal, state and local intelligence agencies.
Jagjeet Singh, the additional commissioner of police, alleged that Deshmukh was an employee of the IRF. This was, however, refuted by an IRF official who said that Deshmukh was not an IRF employee, but that he worked for an Islamic books shop owned by a relative of IRF Chairman Zakir Naik. The shop was situated next to the IRF building in Dongri. The IRF official, however, admitted that Deshmukh used to visit the IRF regularly to use the toilet facilities and read Urdu books.
— Additional input from agencies
