It could be little more than “uncanny coincidences” but the Hyderabad police admit they are exploring a “Taslima Nasreen angle” to the twin blasts that killed 43 people in the city on August 25.

The police, who have issued sketches of members of an entire family of an alleged Bangladeshi illegal immigrant, Rizwan Ghazi, who disappeared from his Kishanbagh house after the August 25 blasts, are investigating whether Ghazi’s father Zainal Abedin Ghazi is linked in any way to a 1994 complaint against the Bangladeshi author for allegedly insulting Islam.

In 1993, a Muslim cleric by the name of Zainal Abedin Babul issued a fatwa against Nasreen and then filed a case against the author in a Dhaka magistrate’s court. The Hyderabad police learnt of Zainal Abedin Ghazi from the passport seized from his daughter Shafia Rafsanjani, a student from Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

She is currently in police custody in connection with her elder brother’s disappearance and the police hope Dhaka can clarify if the similarities in the first names of Babul and Ghazi are a mere coincidence.

Nasreen had visited Hyderabad on August 9 to release translated versions of her work. During her visit, legislators from the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen attacked her at the local Press Club. Police said they are also probing if there is any “greater significance” to the choice of August 25 as the date for the blasts since Nasreen’s birthday falls on that date.

“There are too many uncanny coincidences. We are investigating them,” a senior Hyderabad police officer said.

... contd.