The Gujarat and Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squads have jointly launched an intensive search in the Dangs forests in south Gujarat following intelligence inputs that some terrorists involved in the July 13 Mumbai serial blasts could be hiding there.
The police sources said on Wednesday that so far the joint operation had not yielded result, but the police believed that the thick Dangs forests on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border could be an ideal place for terrorists to hide.
The Dangs forests came on the ATS radars after information obtained from the arrested Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative, Abu Faisal, now lodged in a jail in Madhya Pradesh, said youths from West Bengal and Gujarat were possibly used for the Mumbai blasts. The sources said the police checked on the six names — given by Abu Faisal — said to have been entrusted with the task and found all of them still missing from their addresses in West Bengal and Gujarat.
The tip-off about Abu Faisal was obtained from the noted IM operative Danish Riyaz, who is in the custody of the Gujarat police following his arrest at the Vadodara railway station on June 21. Riyaz, who worked as a software engineer in Hyderabad, reportedly told a joint interrogation team that information about the Mumbai serial blasts could be available from Abu Faisal, following which the police teams went to Madhya Pradesh to question Faisal.
The information revealed by Riyaz had also enabled the police to arrest the noted IM activist, Haroon, in Kolkata on Monday. The 26-year-old Haroon, who owned a cloth business in Kolkata, had met Riyaz several times in Hyderabad and his hometown Ranchi. The sources said Haroon's e-mail accounts had shown that he was in touch with some Taliban leaders and could be involved in the Mumbai blasts.
