In a joint operation, UP and West Bengal Police and central security agencies arrested Altaf from Baranagar area of West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district on Saturday. They claimed, during the interrogation, the arrested HuJI militants had confessed that the consignment of ammonium nitrate and RDX was brought from Jammu and West Bengal.
The Bangladesh police have pressed charges against 21 militants of the outlawed Harkat ul Jihad e Islami and a former Bangladesh Nationalist Party minister for the grenade attack on former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's rally in 2004 that left her injured and killed 24 others
An IB dossier on the organisation indicates that SIMI split in 2006. The IB says SIMI provides logistical support to the Laskhar-e-Tayiba and Harkat-ul-Jihadi.
Intelligence Bureau sources say Bilal was gunned down in Karachi on August 30, 2007, along with his brother Samad. The IB sources were unable to identify the individuals or agencies responsible for the killings.
Indicating a Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami hand behind the serial blasts in Assam, the Border Security Force on Thursday said they had prior information on a possible intrusion by militants from Bangladesh for carrying out the deed.
A suspected militant of THE Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami was arrested by the Delhi police and 3.1 kg of deadly RDX was recovered following his questioning, eight days after serial blasts rocked Jaipur claiming 65 lives. Abdul Rehman, in his early thirties, was caught from Chelmsford Road near New Delhi Railway Station on Wednesday night when he was coming to the capital from West Bengal, a senior police officer said.
A terrorist organisation 'Indian Mujahideens' on Friday claimed responsibility for the serial bomb blasts in Uttar Pradesh, where at least 13 people were killed in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow. Earlier, intelligence officers said Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had claimed responsibility.
The needle of suspicion is on the Bangladeshi population in Jaipur after the blasts. Rediff.com checks out the ground realities.
The four included a man who was injured in the explosions and a rickshaw puller, the police said on Wednesday. Preliminary examination of the blast sites indicated the possibility of ammonium nitrate being planted in new cycles and filled with ball bearings and small iron pipes to act as splinters, sources said.
The government has initiated a series of steps to check the spread of the Islamic in India, including the launch of a counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation strategy.
The IB says Al Qaeda suspects that the growing proximity between India and the US will prove fatal for its operations in Afghanistan and with its threat it hopes to slow down Indian designs of helping the US there.
The militant group accused RAW of deliberately linking its name to fundamentalists and communal groups to tarnish its image in front of the international community.
Sources said that there could be similarities between the explosives used in Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad in May this year and Satudrday's explosion.
In fact news of his death started trickling in a few days after the twin blasts in Hyderabad. But the Intelligence Bureau said that it was a ploy by their counterparts in Pakistan to mislead investigations. While Bilal's death is more or less confirmed now, Indian intelligence agencies feel he was killed due to professional rivalry.
Intelligence Bureau intercepts have pointed to the movement of terrorists from both the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Harkat-ul-Jihadi into West Bengal in order to carry out an attack on Kolkata.
Bashir Ahmed Mir, the chief operational commander of the militant outfit Harkat-ul-Jehadi-Islami, was killed in Jammu and Kashmir on Friday. According to the police, Mir was the mastermind behind the Uttar Pradesh serial court blasts.
Security officials said about 25 to 30 militants were active in the area and are now only indulging in activities like kidnapping unmarried girls and extorting money.
Although the role of Shahid Bilal is not ruled out in the Uttar Pradesh blasts, the police say that the serial blasts were conducted under the supervision of Sabah Hijaji, another commander of the HuJI.
The Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami, which has been maintaining a low-profile for some time, is planning a second terror attack on Ajmer, according to Intelligence Bureau sources.Intelligence Bureau sources told rediff.com that the HuJI, an offshoot of the dreaded Laskhar-e-Tayiba, plans to send across a double message through this operation. The police crackdown on the Bangladeshi immigrants following the Jaipur blasts has not gone down too well with the outfit.
The police alleged that the two were involved in the serial blasts that left over a dozen people dead and nearly 50 other injured.
Even as the confusion looms large, Shahid's father and several others in Hyderabad believe that Bilal is dead after being shot down in an encounter in Pakistan. Today, Bilal's 16-11-240 residence in Hyderabad's Moosrambagh locality wears a deserted look.
The Mecca Masjid blasts in Hyderabad opened a new chapter in terrorism. Terror groups such as the Lashkar e Toiba and Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami declared that this was just the beginning of a series of attacks.
Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria said on Wednesday in Jaipur that the Forensic Science report confirmed the use of RDX in Tuesday's serial blasts in the Pink City, which claimed at least 67 lives and left nearly 200 others injured. Kataria said the explosives were very powerful timer bombs having over 1,700 pellets.
Five persons including two top militant commanders and an army soldier were killed in a 24-hour-long encounter in Dooru village near the north Kashmir apple-rich Sopore town in Baramulla district.
IB sources say that the nexus between terror outfits in the North eastern part of the country and the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad Islamiya has been brewing for sometime now.
The conspiracy was hatched by Shahid and his friend Khaja, both residents of Moosarambagh here, police sources said quoting a confessional statement.
The Hyderabad city police has arrested Mohammed Abdul Majid, brother of city bomb blasts mastermind and Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami south India chief Shahid alias Bilal, and his childhood friend Mohammed Shakeel, on charges of criminal conspiracy.
HuJI leader Abu Zandal, who was recently arrested, said they had sent several consignments of grenades to Lashkar outfits operating in India until 2004, an unnamed security official was quoted as saying by the Prothom Alo daily. But the outfit failed to send the last such consignment as the Lashkar representative who was supposed to receive it was killed in an encounter with the Border Security Force near Bangladesh's Kaliganj frontier.
Despite there being such a hue and cry regarding the attack on the Pink City, all the police have managed to do is round off scores of people. Interrogations have led the police to believe that the attack was planned by HuJI and executed by SIMI in India.
To divert part of the international attention away from it and project the increase in jihadi terrorism as a sub-continental and not a purely Pakistani phenomenon, the ISI is likely to accelerate this process of giving Al Qaeda-inspired International Islamic Front, of which all these organisationals are members, a sub-continental visage and clothing and project the so-called Kashmir issue as a root cause of this expanding phenomenon.
The Hyderabad police will hold talks with their Uttar Pradesh counterparts and also interrogate Mohammad Tariq, a Harkat Ul-Jihadi operative who was arrested in connection with the November 23 UP serial blasts.
In a joint operation, the Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir Police on Tuesday arrested two suspected militants of Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islamia from Doda area of Jammu in connection with last month's serial blasts in three court premises in UP. The two, identified as Sajjad and Tariq Kashmiri alias Akhthar, were arrested from Doda town by the police forces of the two states alongwith sleuths of Central Security agencies and taken to Lucknow on a transit remand.
Though the state officials denied any possibility of a fidayeen attack, sources maintained that the suicide bombers were planning to target a particular VVIP, reported to be Chief Minister Mayawati.
Magistrate, Alipore court, Jayanta Kolay directed the CID to hand them over to the Uttar Pradesh police and produce them in an appropriate court in Lucknow by June 30.
They were planning attacks in New Delhi.
Police put up barricades along all important crossways and a thorough screening of vehicles was conducted. Suspected pedestrians were being questioned.
The needle of suspicion since day one was on the Lashkar-e-Tayiba. This is probably one of the few cases in which the police reacted in quick time.
Police in Delhi have been put on alert after they received inputs from the Intelligence Bureau about the possibility of a terror strike in the near future by Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami militants.
The way the bomb blasts were triggered on May 13 in Jaipur and on August 25, 2007, in Hyderabad showed that the terrorists were trained at the same place, before being 'deputed' to the states by Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, the suspected organisation behind the blasts, according to police sources. A two-member special police team, which went to Jaipur to study the blasts, had came to a conclusion that there were many similarities between the two blasts.
Bangladeshi officials said after questioning HuJI chief Mufty Hannan, they were 'almost sure' that the duo behind several terror attacks in the country had fled to India. The twins were arrested with explosives from New Delhi railway station in February 2006.
