Nepal police on Friday stepped up investigations into the background of two Pakistanis arrested here for smuggling explosives as a local court sent the duo to police custody for five days amid speculations that they could be linked to Tuesday’s terror blasts in Mumbai.
The timing of the Pakistanis’ arrival in Kathmandu raised suspicion.
KATHMANDU: Nepal police on Friday stepped up investigations into the background of two Pakistanis arrested here for smuggling explosives as a local court sent the duo to police custody for five days amid speculations that they could be linked to Tuesday’s terror blasts in Mumbai.
Ghulam Hussain Cheema and Aftab Mahaddin Siddiqui were arrested in the capital on Thursday after police received an alert that the two men, wanted in connection with a five-year-old case involving a senior Pakistani diplomat caught with 16.5 kg of RDX, had resurfaced in Nepal.
The timing of the two men’s arrival in the Nepal capital could have a link to the seven blasts in local trains in Mumbai on Tuesday. While media reports said a team of officials from India’s Research and Analysis Wing and Intelligence Bureau was arriving to question the duo, both Nepal police and the government said they had no information about the arrival of Indian investigators.
“We are looking into the five-year-old RDX case,” maintained Dhak Bahadur Karki, officer-in-charge at the Kathmandu police station. Cheema and Siddiqui were based in Kathmandu in 2001, ostensibly working for a Pakistani construction firm, Sachel Engineering Works Ltd, which could be a front for ISI.
The credentials of the firm came under a cloud in April 2001, when the then first secretary (consular) at the Pakistani Embassy here, Arshad Cheema, was arrested at the firm’s office-cum-residence in the capital with the cache of RDX. He was declared persona non grata by the Nepal government and deported.
However, Ghulam Hussian Cheema, an accounts officer at Sachel, and Sidiqui, a senior project manager, managed to escape. According to Karki, the duo arrived here on July 4 aboard Pakistan International Airline’s Karachi-Kathmandu flight. They checked into the upscale Everest Hotel in the Baneshwor area, a place they are familiar with since the Sachel office too was in the same area.
“The men told us they have come here to collect the payment for an old road construction project,” Karki said.
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