Mumtaz Choudhary, arrested from Navi Mumbai by the ATS in connection with the 7/11 blasts, was a police informer, it now transpires.
MUMBAI: Mumtaz Choudhary, arrested from Navi Mumbai by the ATS in connection with the 7/11 blasts, was a police informer, it now transpires.
Mumtaz was known to tip off the police about illegal migrants from Bangladesh, a senior officer involved in flushing out illegal Bangladeshi migrants said.
Sources said Chaudhary worked as a religious preacher in a nearby madarasa and lived in a small house at Ghansoli.
An official from Navi Mumbai’s Special Branch said the police did not have a dossier on even a single SIMI member since it was banned following active participation in terror acts. He said, “We get notifications from the state director general’s office regarding SIMI, but we don’t have a single SIMI member living in the area under our jurisdiction.”
Meanwhile, the ATS grilled the person who had rented out his house to Choudhary six months back. A verification of Chaudhary’s passport by the regional passport office indicated that it had not been used to travel abroad. The passport had expired in 1994.
'We have some important leads'
The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has logged more than 50,000 hours of interrogation during the last 10 days. But it may take several more gruelling weeks, or even months, to solve the mystery behind the serial blasts which rocked the city on July
11. In his first interview after the incident, ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi said that more than 1,200 people were questioned during the last 10 days. He said 50 officers were dispatched to seven states, to follow up clues gathered from interrogations, which resulted
in the arrest of two from Bihar and one from New Mumbai.
"We have got some important leads and the guilty will be brought to book. It is just a question of time," Raghuvanshi said. —Baljeet Parmar
Engineer questioned
In a late night development, a joint team of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and Mumbai Crime Branch questioned a software engineer from Bangalore for more than five hours in connection with the 7/11 blasts. Joint commissioner of police (Crime) Meeran Borwankar grilled the engineer at the Antop Hill premises of the Crime Branch Unit V.
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