Eight persons have been arrested from West Bengal and Tamil Nadu for allegedly conspiring to commit terrorist activities in India, ANI quoted Pramod Kumar Kushwaha, the additional commissioner of police in the Special Cell, as saying on Sunday.
Seven of those arrested are Bangladeshi nationals, said Kushwaha, adding that with this, “a major untoward incident has been prevented”.
The arrests were made after “anti-national posters” were found pasted in Delhi’s Kashmere Gate metro station, he said.
“The Central Industrial Security Force noticed this and brought it to the attention of the Metro unit of the Delhi Police,” he added.
Following this, the Special Cell of the Delhi Police, in coordination with the West Bengal Police, arrested two persons, identified as Umar Farooq Robil Ul Islam, from Kolkata.
Islam is a Bangladeshi national, Kushwaha was quoted as saying by ANI.
He claimed that the two men had told the police that they were responsible for putting up “anti-India posters” at several places in Delhi.
“Later, it was found out through interrogation and investigation that the direction to them was being given by Shabbir Ahmed Lone, from Bangladesh,” said the police officer.
He added that Lone, who is a resident of Kashmir’s Ganderbal, had been arrested in 2007 with an Avtomat Kalashnikova-47 rifle and grenades while he was allegedly conspiring to carry out a fidayeen, or a suicide attack, on a political leader.
“He remained in jail for many years and was released in 2019,” said Kushwaha. “After his release, he again fled to Bangladesh.”
The police officer claimed: “Initial investigations have revealed that he reconnected with the Lashkar-e-Taiba leadership and re-established his organisation to carry out terrorist activities.”
He further said that anti-India posters were also put up in Kolkata at Lone’s behest on February 10.
“The investigation revealed that some individuals who are Bangladeshi nationals were in Tamil Nadu,” said Kushwaha. “They were going to take them back to Kolkata and plant them in a terrorist activity before they could do anything.”
He added that they were arrested in coordination with the Tamil Nadu Police.
They were identified as Mizanur Rahman, Mohammad Shabat, Umar, Mohammad Litan, Mohammad Shahid and Mohammed Ujjal, reported NDTV. All of them were arrested from garment manufacturing units in Tiruppur district.
The police also recovered dozens of mobile phones and 16 SIM cards from the suspects, which are being analysed for digital evidence and possible foreign links, NDTV reported.
This comes more than three months after a blast near Delhi’s Red Fort that left 13 persons dead. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor, was believed to have been driving the car that exploded.
Hours before the blast, the police said that it had cracked an “inter-state and transnational terror module” in Faridabad and Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur. The police said at the time that it had recovered 2,900 kg of improvised explosive device-making material in raids in several states.
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