Mumbai - Saquib Nachan, the prime suspect in the Ghatkopar and Mulund bomb blasts, has been now booked in the Vile Parle blast that occurred in a crowded vegetable market on January 27, just a day before the visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This latest development is another step in what the police say that there is a likelihood of all the four bomb blasts in the city during the last six months may be interconnected. Nachan has already been implicated as one of the prime conspirators in the bomb blast on a Karjat-bound train at Mulund railway station that killed 11 people and injured 70 others. He has also been accused in the bomb explosion on a public bus near Ghatkopar railway station in which three persons were killed and 32 were injured.
| Busy little fellow, isn't he? |
Following the Ghatkopar blast was another explosion in a restaurant in Mumbai Central station on December 6, 2002, a day that marked the tenth anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition.
| That kind of implies the involvement of a turban... |
And only recently was another crude bomb found on a cycle in Dongri. Police say all these blasts could be interconnected and a part of a larger terror module of the Lashkar e-Taiba to strike at crowded places to cause a large number of deaths and thus create a communal divide. Meanwhile, two more persons have been picked up in connection with the Mulund blast. They are Haroon Rashid Mohammed Yamin, 27, and Rashid Ahmed Abdul Malik, 35, who were picked up from Kurla. The judge in those cases also extended the police remand of Noor Mohammed Abdul Ansari, the accused who was trained in Pakistan and arrested in Malegaon, Maharashtra, besides Wahid Ansari. Other main conspirators in the serial blasts are Anwar Ali, a temporary Urdu lecturer at the country‚s prestigious National Defence Academy in Pune and Noor Mohammed Abdul Ansari who had been trained in Pakistan. Following the arrest of Nachan, police were able to pick up several accused in the conspiracy case, through information from the confession of Nachan. Most of them are activists of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India. |