The arrest of 15 more men by the Mumbai police in connection with a string of bomb blasts across the country and the busting of the “media wing” of the Indian Mujahideen has laid bare a network of “educated men from respectable families”, some of them with “highly paid salaries”, working in tandem to wreak havoc, officials said on Monday.

Prominent among the 15 are Mohammed Mansoor Asghar Peerbhoy (31), a computer engineer who worked for an MNC, and Mubin alias Salman Kadar Shaikh (24), a computer science graduate. Both allegedly travelled all the way from Pune to Mumbai to send terror e-mails. The Indian Mujahideen had spent around “Rs 70,000 in training these two in hacking” said Rakesh Maria, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime).

While investigators were probing the terror e-mails, it was an interrogation report of an Azamgarh accused, Shahbaz, by the Rajasthan Police which first indicated the presence of a separate media wing. “It was in the third e-mail that the group emphasised that they had a media wing working purely on the publicity front,” said Hemant Karkare, Joint Commissioner of Police, Anti-Terrorism Squad.

The idea of sending e-mails was to claim credit for the terror blasts, which, they have allegedly told investigators, was Riyaz Bhatkal’s way of getting more attention and thus more funds from people with similar criminal intentions. The media wing’s second threat e-mail sent from Khalsa College’s unsecured wi-fi network was “to deride authorities and get them off track (from investigation),” adds Maria.

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