Malegaon network behind Samjhauta? Haryana joins probe

The Haryana police team hopes to pick up the investigation from Indore where the trail last went cold.

With this, the Malegaon investigation is spreading much beyond its original ambit. For, the CBI director told The Indian Express last week that a link has already been established between the Malegaon blast and the one in Nanded two years ago in which two Bajrang Dal activists were killed while they were allegedly making a pipe bomb.

DGP Ranjiv Dalal confirmed the Indore connection was a strong reason for the team to now question Purohit and Thakur.

Thakur lived in Indore for a while and attended religious functions there.

Dalal, however, said the finer details like similarity of nature of explosives used in Malegaon blasts and so on were yet to be shared by the Mumbai ATS. “Our senior level officials are keeping in close contact with the Mumbai ATS and we are awaiting more details from them. While nothing new has come out of it yet, we are very keen to crack the case and are working on it”, Dalal said. Pakistan has repeatedly raised the train blast probe issue at all anti-terror meets that have taken place after the Samjhauta blast.

While the Pakistani side insists on the status and progress of the probe at all such interactions, New Delhi’s refrain has been that the trail has been tracked until Indore.

At a joint anti-terror meeting in May 2007, India handed over a photograph of a Pakistani national to Islamabad saying the man who had disappeared in 2006 in India could be a suspect in the blast and asked them to help trace him.

According to an eyewitness account of one Rana Shaukat Ali — who was on the train and had lost five of his children in the blast — this suspected man had jumped off the train midway after an argument with a passenger. The police had then put out his sketches as one of the two suspects behind the blasts. The Pakistani government, however, had later said they had found no trace of any such person in Pakistan.

The Samjhauta connection to the Malegaon blasts lies in Indore where the Haryana police’s investigation finally led — and ended.

The Haryana police had then revealed that the suitcases used in the explosion on the train were purchased from the Abhinandan Bag Centre in Indore’s Kothari Market while a tailor who sat opposite the shop stitched the suitcase covers. That apart, the whole paraphernalia used to create the suitcase bomb was found to have largely been sourced from within 1-2 km of the Kothari market, including the pipe bomb shells used and the Super Saurabh plastic boxes which contained the IED. The Haryana police was quite convinced of a strong Indore connection to the Samjhauta blast probe and had done the whole drill like vetting names and addresses of passengers from Indore who boarded the train before and after the day of the blast. However, they could not make any headway after that on the Indore connection that has only revived now with the questioning of the Sadhvi and Purohit.