More than 300 men in uniform, armed to the teeth, got down from 60 police vehicles around 5.30 am in the village.
Cops on trail of 2 alleged financiers of Delhi module
AZAMGARH: Sanjarpur, a small nondescript village of this remote east UP district, was jolted out of its sleep early on Tuesday as a 22-member team of the Delhi Anti-Terrorism Squad aided by UP police swooped down here to piece together evidence related to the Delhi serial blasts.
The police teams, tracing the whereabouts of seven missing members of the Indian Mujahideen module allegedly behind recent serial bombings across the country, searched several houses.
More than 300 men in uniform, armed to the teeth, got down from 60 police vehicles around 5.30 am in the village. The residents were bewildered as the cops went on a house-to-house search.
“We were ready for an encounter,” a Delhi Police official said later. They were taking no chances after the Jamia Nagar shootout in which Delhi Police lost one of its most daring and decorated officers in inspector Mohan Chand Sharma.
The Delhi police team had brought along Saquib Nissar, one of the alleged terrorists who had planted a bomb in the capital’s Gaffar Market on September 13. He is an MBA student at the Sikkim Manipal University.
Police sources told this reporter that the surprise raid was conducted to hunt down seven missing members of the Delhi module — Asadullah, Shadab, Khalid, Shahzad, Salman, Arif and Junaid — who belong to Azamgarh.
Acting on Saquib’s information, police seized some CDs and a photo album from the house of Atif, the alleged mastermind of the Delhi blasts who was shot dead in the Jamia Nagar encounter.
The police also conducted searches in three other adjoining villages. They took six persons into custody but, sources said, they did not learn much from them. A police official said it was surprising that no photographs of any of the suspects were recovered from their homes. “They seem to have been deliberately removed by family members,” he said.
The police raid resulted in anger and resentment among villagers who alleged that the entire thing was a big frame-up. “If my son is guilty, he should be shot dead. But if the police say my 16-year-old son is a terrorist, they should prove it before they even touch him,” said Shadab Ahmed, father of Saif who was arrested from the Jamia Nagar flat where the police encounter took place.
However, Delhi Police officials told reporters that Saif and Saquib had already confessed to their role in the Delhi blasts. “They have even told us who planted the bombs where. We have concrete evidence,” said a Delhi police official. He said that an advance team had been watching the houses of the suspects for the past few days and the Tuesday morning raid was planned only late on Monday night after conferring with top officials of the UP Police.
Police sources said two alleged financiers of the Delhi module were also being tracked. “But we will pin them down only after we have incontrovertible evidence,” an official said.
Agencies said the police claimed to have traced a bank account in the name of Atif in Pawai (Azamgarh) through which Rs3 crore had been transacted in the last six months. The bank’s manager, however, denied any such account in the name of Atif in the bank.
Meanwhile, an official spokesman told reporters in Lucknow that the UP Police had conducted raids in Gorakhpur and Jaunpur, too, acting on information related to terrorists’ hideouts. However, no arrests or seizures were made, he added.
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