Jama Masjid incident: Mumbai police spoils Delhi police's party

Turf war between the elite crime branch and anti-terrorist squad of the Mumbai police is believed to have spoiled Delhi police's investigations into the suspected terror attack outside the historic Jama Masjid in the national capital.

A three-member team of the Delhi police had visited Mumbai after the incident on Sunday last with some specific leads provided by the central security agencies about the email and the technique used by banned Indian Mujahideen only to find that everything had been leaked to media, sources privy to the probe said.

They also found interesting developments that the operator - Tata Doccomo - had been approached by the two elite forces of the Mumbai police separately and details of the phone number were taken and were leaked to media.

The matter was shared with the Union home ministry, which asked the two wings of Maharashtra to maintain utmost secrecy in the matter.

The Delhi police team which had gone to investigate into the leads of the case returned empty handed because of lack of coordination, the sources said. However, officially there was no word either from the Delhi police or Mumbai police on this.

Two unidentified motorcycle-borne attackers had on Sunday last today shot and injured two Taiwanese nationals outside the Jama Masjid here which was followed by a crude pressure cooker bomb blast in a car in the same area.

The Indian Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attack in an e-mail sent to PTI and some other news organisations and threatened terror strikes during the Games.

In a related development, department of telecom has again come under attack for its failure to maintain discipline among the operators to verify the SIM cards.

In this case, the youth identifying himself as Purva Shinde procured an activated SIM card on absolutely fake documents and got the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) activated. Using this technology, the accused IM cadre surfed into a server based in Norway.

The email was already saved in draft folder of "al.arbi999123@gmail.com" and was accessed using the GPRS phone at 13:37 hours on September 19 and sent to various media houses.

The authorities have now asked for stringent action against the offenders for issuing an activated SIM card.