THE SUSPECTED terrorist arrested from Viswabharati Fast Passenger train at Bardhaman station has links to terror groups Islamic State (ISIS) and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), the state Crime Investigation Department said on Tuesday.
A resident of Labhpur in Birbhum district, 25-year-old Mosiruddin alias Mosi alias Majnu, has admitted to having links with top ISIS leaders and the JMB through emails, social networking sites and mobile phones, DIG (CID) Dilip Adak told mediapersons.
This comes a day after Mosiruddin was arrested on Monday evening by Bardhaman railway police and the state police following inputs from National Investigation Agency (NIA). “We are not ruling out his link with the IS. A 13-inch chopper, an improvised small firearm and three rounds of cartridges were recovered from him,” Adak said.
He added: “He was residing at Tamil Nadu’s Trippur district for four to five years and worked at a grocery shop. We had come to know that he was returning to Kolkata yesterday and we started keeping a tab of his movements… He got down at Howrah station and went to Esplanade in Kolkata, where he bought a sharp weapon. He then returned to Howrah station and boarded the train to go to Labhpur.”
Officers were going through Mosiruddin’s mobile phone call list, his emails and the documents seized from him to confirm his involvement with ISIS and JMB.
“We are also looking into whether he has any link to the terrorist attack in Dhaka’s Holey Artisan Bakery restaurant,” the officer said.
Police sources said NIA had been tracking Mosiruddin since he was in Tamil Nadu. “He had been using social networking sites to keep in touch with his associates overseas… We are looking for Mosiruddin’s associates who may be operating from Bengal… Six SIM cards and two fake voter IDs have been recovered,” said a source.
During a joint interrogation by CID, NIA and Intelligence Bureau (IB), Mosiruddin has admitted to his connection to Amjad Sheikh — an alleged key member of JMB — arrested in 2014 in connection with the Khagragarh twin blast case, sources in the CID said.
It has been learnt that after he was detained at Bardhaman station, the district police superintendent and officers of CID and central investigating agencies interrogated him.
On Tuesday morning, Mosiruddin was again questioned after he was brought to the CID headquarters at Bhawani Bhavan in Kolkata. He would be produced at a Howrah court on Wednesday.
Mosiruddin, second of five siblings, had spent his childhood at Labhpur’s Registrypara. “He was a very good child but later I believe he went astray because of the company he kept. He used to work in Tamil Nadu but I don’t know what he did there. He used to send us money initially but after his marriage, it stopped,” his mother Zakira Bibi said.
Sources said Mosiruddin had studied till the secondary level at a local madrasa. He then came to Kolkata to pursue graduation. He later married a girl from Labhpur and had two sons.
Bardhaman had entered the terror map in October, 2014 when two suspected JMB terrorists were killed while making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) at a rented house in Khagragarh. The NIA had arrested a mechanical engineering student on suspicion of being a terrorist from Durgapur in March, this year. Another person, suspected to be a Bangladeshi militant, was also arrested from Asansol later.
[Source:- The Indian Express]
