Two more LeT militants arrested from Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: Two more suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militants were arrested in Ahmedabad on Tuesday, taking the total number of arrests of LeT operatives in Gujarat to four since Monday, a senior police official said.

"Two more militants of a sleeper cell of LeT, operating in the state have been arrested. These arrests are significant and were made on the basis of information revealed by those arrested yesterday", Crime Branch Joint Commissioner P Pandey said.

Police sources said the two were nabbed from Ahmedabad and Bharuch districts. "The two arrested are Kari Mufidul (Bharuch) and Siraj Ansari (Ahmedabad). A computer and several CDs, containing visuals of post-Godhra riots and terrorist training camps have been seized from their possession," they said.

Acting on a tip-off from the intelligence agencies, the Crime Branch busted the module on Monday and seized several incriminating documents and literature from their possession, including a letter pad of LeT, after arresting two suspected militants -- Ilyas Memon and Khalid Kashmiri.

Several phone numbers and coded text were also seized and preliminary probe revealed the presence of other sleeper cell activists possibly in Anand, Bharuch and some other district of South Gujarat, police said.

Gujarat police has been on an alert following the Mumbai train serial blasts and Malegaon blasts.

Police also found links between the militants' module in Maharashtra and modules existing in Gujarat and have been keeping an eye on some madrassas in Bharuch, Surat and nearby places for suspicious activity.

Moreover, the Gujarat police got a severe jolt recently when they found out that the key LeT militant Aslam Kashmiri, who had helped set up the module in Aurangabad, had stayed in a madrassa near Bharuch for four years before disappearing in 2005.

Police sources said that Kashmiri had used Surat distict as his base while he recruited terror opertatives in Maharashtra and Gujarat. He also used a local mobile phone to make calls to Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Gujarat police had also failed to spot the presence of four militants of Harkar-ul-Mujahedein (HuM) who had moved the state for four months till they were tracked and killed in an encounter on March 17 2006 on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.