BHOPAL: The Madhya Pradesh police has launched a fresh hunt for Abu Fazal Khan alias Farhan Khan, a Mumbai-based activist of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), for his alleged role in the Ahmedabad serial blasts, officials said Thursday.
Khan is suspected to have booked four vehicles which were stolen from Navi Mumbai and later, after their number plates were changed in Bharuch, were laden with explosives, said the police officials.
Two of these vehicles were used in the July 26 blasts in Ahmedabad while the other two were found abandoned in Surat.
Khan, who is from Mumbai and studied at the Gujarati Homeopathic College in Indore, was arrested for the first time in 2006 for his alleged links with Khandwa-based SIMI activist Imran Ansari. But he was given bail by an Indore court a week later and never turned up during the trials.
When the sketch of one of the suspects in the May 13 Jaipur blasts turned out to have a resemblance to him, the Rajasthan police started searching for him.
Former SIMI national general secretary Safdar Nagori, according to the officials, has also revealed that Khan had attended a training camp in a forest near Indore.
Nagori and 12 other SIMI activists were arrested March 27 from Indore and were sent to different jails in the state under judicial custody. Five of them including Nagori were recently shifted to Rewa.
Nagori, along with his brother Karimuddin, are key suspects in the Ahmedabad blasts, as the police have alleged they were trainers at a SIMI training camp in Kerala in December 2007 and in Halol in Gujarat in January 2008, where the conspiracy for the Ahmedabad blasts was hatched.
The Madhya Pradesh police are also probing whether Nagori had arranged for funds to procure explosives and other materials used in the Ahmedabad blasts.
