MUMBAI: A fourth arrest has been made as part of the 11/7 serial blasts probe, but little else has been done by investigators to counter the assertion of New Delhi’s security establishment that the previous arrests were “insignificant”.
On Sunday night, the crime branch of the city police arrested Tanveer Mohammed Ansari, 32, a Unani doctor, from a locality in central Mumbai.
He was produced in the metropolitan magistrate’s court at Mazgaon and remanded in police custody till August 4. Crime branch officers handed him over to the Anti-Terrorist Squad.
Police said Ansari may have had a hand in the blast at Matunga Road station in which 38 people died and 40 were injured.
They said he is suspected of having provided the perpetrators of the blasts with local train timings and shelter in Mumbai.
ATS officers said Ansari received training in subversion and sabotage at a Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT) camp in Pakistan in 2004.
“He underwent training in the handling of firearms and explosives at the camp,” said Joint Commissioner of Police KP Raghuvanshi, who heads the ATS.
Regarding New Delhi’s charge of “insignificant” arrests, the ATS said it is handicapped by the lack of “physical clues”. “Unlike in 1993, we have no physical clues this time,” Raghuvanshi said. Turn to p16
The squad has not been able to extract much from Kamal Ansari, who was arrested with two others last week. But the ATS insisted that he “may have” some knowledge of how the materials used in the explosives were smuggled into the city.
On Mumtaz Chaudhary, who is another of the arrested persons, the ATS said it is still verifying his antecedents by calling his relatives and friends.
The officers were tight-lipped on the role of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), some of whose members were detained in the immediate aftermath of the blasts.
