Delhi struck by Ahmedabad bombers

Two Ahmedabad-based SIMI activists, who were part of the nine men who assembled and planted bombs in the Ahmedabad serial blasts, were also involved in the Delhi blasts, sources in the Gujarat Police told India Today.

The sources said the two bombers are Alamzeb Afridi and Mujib, both in their twenties. The Gujarat Police had been tracking the two ever since they went absconding.

The Gujarat Police traced a mobile phone used by the two men to three of the four places where bombs were planted in Delhi between 60 and 90 minutes before the blasts occurred, the sources said.

Further enquiries by the police revealed that the two had stayed in Nizamuddin area of Delhi for over a week before the blasts, the sources said.

This now confirms that the Delhi blasts are closely linked to Ahmedabad blasts.

Further, given the modus operandi used by the terrorists in the Delhi blasts, the Ahmedabad blasts investigators and the intelligence agencies are convinced that the two elusive SIMI operators, Abdul Subhan Qureshi alias Bilal Tauqeer of Mumbai and Qaimuddin Kapadia of Vadodara are the masterminds behind the Delhi bomb blasts.

These two terrorists are the major missing links in the exercise to unravel the web of terror spread by SIMI which began with the arrest of 10 activists including Mufti Bashir by the Gujarat police last month, almost three weeks after the Ahmedabad blasts. The modus operandi in the Delhi blasts matches to that of Ahmedabad blasts --- the make of the bombs, use of by cycle and the emails by Indian Mujahideen before the blasts.

Bashar who is still under Gujarat police's remand had told that three cities including Delhi were on SIMI's target list but where the attacks were yet to be carried out.

It was on the basis of this information that Narendra Modi told the Prime Minister that Delhi was next on the terror list when the Gujarat Chief Minister met him last week.

Investigators are now as good as convinced that the terror emails landing with media minutes before the blasts are being sent by Tauqeer. For these are signed by one Al-Arbi and the handwriting matches with handwriting of Tauqeer.

And also, the very fact that the email that landed before the Delhi blasts was also sent from Mumbai after hacking a Wi-Fi system as in the case of the email sent before the Ahmedabad blasts indicates that the emails were the handiwork of Tauqeer who is also a resident of Mumbai.

Except some dissimiliarities, the contents of the email were not very different from the ones sent on July 26 and then on August 23 after the arrests of the SIMI activists.

While the first one began with "Revenge for the Gujarat riots", the one received on the eve of the Delhi blasts was titled ' Eye for an eye ' and ' Dust will not settle down '. The heading in the August 23 email, which rubbished the arrests made by the Gujarat police calling them 'arrests of innocents ', was ' Truth revealed ".

There was one similarity between the August 23 email and the Delhi blast email. Both made mockery of Gujarat police officials led by DGP PC Pande and the Narendra Modi government and warn that the attacks will persist.

As in the earlier emails, Delhi email warned the Mahrashtra Chief Minister Vilas Rao Deshmukh and Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare.

Significantly, following the investigations into the Ahmedabad blasts, it has now come to the fore that the SIMI network is perhaps the largest and the strongest in UP but the state police has done precious little to arrest some known SIMI hands despite being intimated by security agencies across the country, particularly after the breakthrough in the Ahmedabad bomb blast case last month.

This is said to be because of pressures of vote-bank politics. According to the intelligence sources, some key SIMI activists from Azamgarh area including Habib and Shahbaz Alam are missing from their homes after the Delhi blasts.

The Gujarat police has been moving heaven and earth to nab Tauqeer and Kapadia and last fortnight it came very close to nabbing the Mumbai techie after chancing upon some clues but finally missed him.

Source: indiatoday