Unhappy with the Allahabad High Courts judgment in the Ayodhya case,the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Indian Mujahideen (IM) planned to target the judges and the advocates who argued for a temple,Madhya Pradesh police claimed on Wednesday. The anti-terrorist squad (ATS) of MP police had arrested eight SIMI and IM activists from Jabalpur and the Habibganj Railway Station in Bhopal on Sunday. ATS chief Vipin Maheshwari said they had conducted one or two recces in Lucknow in the last couple of months. They wanted to choose a softer target of them all, Maheshwari told The Indian Express,adding they were yet to fine-tune the operation. The activists were arrested in connection with the murders of two ATS constables,one in Ratlam last week,and the other in Khandwa in 2009. The police said the activists had also conspired to eliminate Sanjay Pandey,a jailer in Satna,for allegedly misbehaving with SIMI cadres while they were in jail. Despite a recce and a rented house in Satna,the plan did not work out because Pandeys security had been stepped up following intelligence inputs,the police claimed it was their failure to murder Pandey that drove them to target Sitaram Yadav,an ATS constable who was gunned down in Khandwa on November 29,2009. The SIMI believed,according to police,that Yadav was responsible for the arrest of many of its members. The police claimed they wanted to teach Yadav and the squad a lesson. The ATS said the arrested persons confessed to killing Yadav after an elaborate conspiracy that involved renting a house in Khandwa and monitoring his movements for days. They had rented a house in Chhanera,40 kms away from Khandwa,and stole a motorcycle from Harda nearly two weeks before the eventual murder.
