BOMBAY, 22 July 2006 — In a major breakthrough, a joint team of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) probing into the July 11 Bombay train blasts, have arrested three suspects who have links in Nepal and Bangladesh, officials said yesterday.
Two of the arrests were made in Bihar on Thursday evening and one suspect was picked up from Bombay yesterday morning in the first formal arrests in the terror blasts that killed 207 and led to severe injuries and loss of limbs to over 900, the official said.
The suspects picked up from Basopatti village of Madhubani district in Bihar by IB sleuths were identified as Muhammed Khalil Sheikh and Muhammed Kalam Ansari. They were brought by a special aircraft to Bombay yesterday morning. The third accused, Mumtaz Ahmed Chaudhary, was nabbed from Ghansoli in New Bombay.
The breakthrough came after the ATS of Bombay Police scanned records of telephone calls made minutes after the horrific terror attacks on Bombay’s suburban railway network, the city’s lifeline.
The trio were remanded in police custody till July 31 after they were produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate A.V. Shatye of the Mazagaon Court in southcentral Bombay yesterday afternoon amid tight security.
They have been arrested under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA), and have been booked under Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder), 326 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons), 147 (rioting), 149 (unlawful assembly) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Indian Explosive Act, officials said. A senior police official told Arab News that the ATS had also seized two kilograms of gun powder from Ansari and Sheikh in Bihar.
Briefing reporters in Bombay yesterday, ATS chief and Bombay Police Joint Commissioner Krish Pal Raghuvanshi said: “This is part of a bigger conspiracy and more people are involved in the blast. There has been some local help too in the attacks.”
“The arrested have links to Nepal and Bangladesh, which are directly or indirectly linked to Pakistan.”
The ATS chief, however, refrained from naming any individual terror groups linked to the blast.
“It will be premature to name any individual terror group at this stage.
The investigations are at a very sensitive stage and it will not be proper for me to reveal or name any individual terror outfits or groups behind the attacks,” the ATS chief said.
“All the three arrested have been involved in terrorist activities,” he maintained.
“Now that the arrested have been remanded to police custody, interrogations would reveal the complete picture,” Raghuvanshi added.
“Kalam has been involved in one case which has been registered in Delhi,” he said.
Investigators had detained hundreds of people across the country for questioning since the bombings, but the three men were the first to be formally arrested.
Meanwhile, the Bihar crime branch has detained a person identified as Mohammad Akram from Dangra village in Gaya district in connection with the serial blasts.
Police recovered some photographs and a mobile phone from Akram in Gaya.
“We are interrogating him on the basis of some evidence. As of now nothing can be said with confidence about him,” Gaya Superintendent of Police Amit Jain told IANS in Patna.
Police sources said Akram was interrogated till late into the night Thursday by Jain and IB officials. However, nothing concrete came of it.
“Akram was again interrogated Friday morning under tight police security,” a police source said.
Police had arrested Akram as his appearance resembled one of the two suspects whose sketch was published in newspapers by Bombay Police, a police official said in Patna.
Akram is a teacher in a madarasa at Mysore in Karnataka, police said. After his arrest, Akram claimed that he was innocent and had nothing to do with the Bombay blasts.
In an another interesting twist to the blasts case, the Kenyan police have arrested Abdul Karim Tunda, a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant in Mombassa alleging that Tunda was a suspect in the Serial train blasts in Bombay and was on the wanted list.
A police official said that the Kenyan police are processing his papers for possible extradition to India.
— With input from agencies
