Mumbai: Investigation officers say there is enough evidence to indicate Mufti Abu Bashir’s involvement in the July 26 Ahmedabad Blast.
Crime Branch sources say that the alleged mastermind of the serial blasts, which killed 55 and injured scores, has revealed his involvement during an interrogation.
“He is an important member of Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and many other names are coming out in the investigations. He has revealed many things and there are clear cut indications of his involvement in the Ahmedabad blast,” says DCP crime branch Adhay chudasama.
“He was involved in the planning and training of the people,” he added.
Bashir was arrested from Azamgarh district in Uttar Pradesh on Saturday by the UP Anti-Terrorist Squad and Gujarat Police.
He was brought to Ahmedabad a night after a Lucknow court granted his three-day transit remand to Gujarat Police.
Bashir was sent to 14-day police custody on Sunday.
Metropolitan Magistrate JK Pandya passed the order after police sought his custody for interrogation to unravel the details of the conspiracy behind the blasts in which 55 people had lost their lives.
Bashir was then produced before Magistrate Pandya at his residence for special hearing.
The other SIMI activists accused in the bomb blast case were also remanded to 14-day police custody by the Metropolitan court.
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Meanwhile, Ahmedabad Police has also sealed a two-room flat of the Ahmedabad serial bomb blast accused Imran Ibrahim Sheikh in the communally sensitive Bawamanpura locality that was allegedly used for providing shelter to SIMI activists and assembling of bombs prior to the July 26 terror attack.
The flat, located in the third floor of the four-storeyed Akmal Complex, was reportedly visited by another blast mastermind Abdul Subhan alias Taufique four days ahead of the blasts in Ahmedabad.
According to police sources, Taufique, who went underground after successfully executing the plan, stayed in the flat for a couple of days to help assemble the bombs with other senior SIMI activists involved in the crime.
The flat, now being guarded by Jawans of the Gujarat State Reserve Police, would be opened when a team of Ahmedabad Crime Branch, investigating the blast case, would arrive here with Forensic experts later this evening, sources said.
Twenty-two-year-old Sheikh was picked up by the crime branch sleuths from his Taiwada residence in the city early this month after it was revealed during investigation that he had not only sheltered the SIMI activists, but also played a key role in the entire conspiracy.
Meanwhile, city police have arrested one Mohammad Umar Abdul Gani Qureshi, owner of Masoom Apartment in the Panigate area of the city, for allegedly giving one of his flats to arrested SIMI leader Sajid Mansoori on rent, way back in 2005.
Querishi was booked under section 188 of the IPC for not giving details about his tenant to the police, which had been made mandatory for every landlord in the city by an order of the police commissioner.
The former Gujarat zonal head of the banned Muslim organisation, Mansoori, who was evading arrest since the police raid on SIMI's Surat conference in 2001, was nabbed from Bharuch fifteen days after the Ahmedabad blasts. Considered as the chief coordinator of the entire SIMI operations in Ahmedabad and Surat, Mansoori had made Vadodara his base camp for four long years before shifting to Bharuch in April this year, sources said.
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