Ahmedabad blasts accused and SIMI ranking leader Sajjid Mansuri not only identified Afzal Mutalib Usmani, arrested on Wednesday, as the man who got the stolen cars to Ahmedabad, but also said that he was one of the train bombers. He said that he replaced a polytechnic lecturer in Mumbai as the bomber when the latter chickened out.

The fact is that rather than going into meticulous and methodical terror investigations, the police is desperate to can the cases even though the name of Ameer Raza Khan opens another deadly can of worms. The now incarcerated HUJI commander Babu Bhai, arrested by UP STF on June 23, 2007, after the encounter of Asif Raza Khan in Gujarat in 2001 worked with brother Ameer and was involved in the kidnapping of Partho Burman of Khadim shoes in Kolkata. The four crore rupee ransom, according to Babu Bhai, was shared by Aftab Ansari and was even sent to Omar Sayeed Sheikh in Pakistan. So does this mean that the serial blasts in India are linked with forces that operate with Al Qaida, or those who were part of the 9/11 conspiracy ? Did Delhi Police or Mumbai Police ever interrogate Babu Bhai to find out about Ameer Raza as the former sent 23 UP youth for subversive training in Pakistan through HUJI’s Asadullah in Bangladesh? Why did the UP police not uncover all the Babu Bhai’s links? Some of them were in Azamgarh.

For the record, the same Asadullah had links with the Hyderabad group of Shahid Bilal,who in turn was in touch with Ameer Raza Khan and Rasool Party, part of the Gujarat module and involved in Haren Pandya murder. Rather than crow about their achievements and confuse the average Indian, the Indian police and intelligence agencies need to go back to the drawing board. Perhaps, all those arrested this month are mere foot-soldiers with their bosses sitting across the Line of Control. It is evident that there is someone who is using pan-Islamic jehadi groups like HUJI, LeT and Jaish e Mohammed to target India through local modules.

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