Mahant Amritanand alias Sudhakar Dwivedi—now called Dayanand Pandey by the Maharashtra ATS—was in constant touch with some suspects in the Kanpur blast case and had changed his mobile phone four times in 20 days to evade the police.

In fact, Dayanand Pandey is the name of a disciple that the mahant used for procuring a SIM card.

The Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of UP Anti-Terror Squad, Rajiv Krishna, said: “Our team had traced Mahant Amritanand’s phone number in the course of electronic surveillance of the suspects in the (Kanpur) blast case. He was in constant touch with those people. Meanwhile, the Mumbai ATS team contacted us with the same mobile number to trace the mahant wanted in the Malegaon case.”

“Since October 26 (when the Maharashtra ATS passed on the number), we were keeping a watch on him. He went to Gujarat, MP and Rajasthan before coming to Lucknow a week ago. The ATS team led by SSP Rajiv Sabbarwal and Deputy SP Ravindra Singh was watching his moves,” the DIG said. He was arrested from Kanpur.

The UP ATS team had been on the trail of 12 persons involved in storing explosives and timer-devices at Rajiv Nagar in Kanpur’s Kalyanpur.

With the arrest of the mahant, ATS officers are hopeful of connecting the missing links of the blast that killed two Bajrang Dal activists—Bhupinder Singh Chopra and Rajiv Mishra—on August 24. The ATS has evidence to show that Bhupinder and Rajiv received instructions from the suspects who are yet to be picked up, sources said. The ATS would seek a local court’s permission for the interrogation of the suspects soon. Sources said they might interrogate the mahant, too, in the case.