Three Al-Qaeda terror suspects arrested in kolkata sent to police custody till Dec 5

The three suspected Al-Qaeda linkmen arrested on Tuesday by Special Task Force (STF) officials of Kolkata Police have been sent to police custody till December 5.

Sources said that they had put up at different places across the country such as Bihar, Telangana, Karnataka and Jharkhand but they had been most active from Hyderabad where they had spent the maximum time.

Interrogation so far had revealed that the two Bangladeshi citizens had been part of a plan to kill a blogger belonging to Mokto Mona, an internet community for freethinkers, atheists, and rationalists.

It was found out that Samsad Mia alias Tushar Biswas was the head of the explosives section of banned Bangladeshi group Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), which was earlier responsible for the murder of several bloggers in Bangladesh and has direct links with Al-Qaeda. After entering India illegally, they had been touring the country where they worked as masons and other daily labourers which they would use as a smokescreen and in the backdrop would network and meet people in connection to their plans and would work on computer hardware as well.

STF has informed Central Intelligence Bureau about the developments and Bangladesh officials will also be contacted and updated on the latest findings. Police are also looking into the possibility of presence of others of the group in Kolkata or rest of Bengal.

A team of STF, if need be, would also visit places where they had been allegedly staying, to corroborate the information the duo had given out to police.

On Wednesday, Deputy Commissioner, STF, Murlidhar Sharma at a press conference said that the three – Samsad Mia (26) alias Tushar Biswas, Riazul Islam (25) alias Riaz alias Suman and Manotosh Dey (46) – had been arrested from Kolkata Railway Station in north Kolkata. Of them Samsad and Riazul were Bangladeshi citizens and Dey was an arms dealer hailing from Basirhat in North 24 Parganas.