KOLHAPUR, India, 6 June 2006 — Acting on information provided by the Jammu and Kashmir police about the presence of suspected Hizbul Mujahedeen terrorists in the city, the Kolhapur police raided 120 madrasas and also interrogated those managing the madrasas. But the police failed to find anything objectionable or related to terrorist activities.
A team of the anti-terrorist squad of the Bombay police also arrived in the city to check on intelligence reports of the presence of the members of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahedeen in the city.
The raids followed a report that Hafiz Irfan Attar, killed by police in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir on May 30, was an active Hizbul Mujahideen member and a resident of Kolhapur in Maharashtra. Police raided the house of Moinuddin Attar at Tarabai Park, but failed to find any connection of the Attar family with Irfan. The Attar family claimed that the man killed by police in Kashmir was not Irfan, but another person who they said had been studying religion in Baroda in Gujarat. A team of police officers then carried out search operations in Surat and Baroda.
Not convinced by Moinuddin Attar’s statement, the Kolhapur police do not rule out the possibility of conducting a DNA test on Moinuddin and check whether that matches with the slain terrorist.
Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil paid a visit to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur and met RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan, who expressed satisfaction over the security arrangements. Patil later told reporters that Thursday’s attack on the RSS headquarters could be foiled only because the police had been keeping a watch on the activities of the terrorists for the past seven months.
