Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar on Sunday came out in support of the Special Cell authenticating the arrest of suspected Hizb-ul Mujahideen militant Liaquat. He is being quizzed by sleuths of the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing.
The police have also released a sketch of the suspected terrorist who had stayed at the Haji Arafat Guesthouse near the Jama Masjid and from whose room they claim to have seized an AK-56 rifle of Chinese make, explosives and hand grenades.
“It has been reported in the media that, according to the Jammu and Kashmir police, Liaquat had plans to surrender. However, they have not yet communicated with us in this regard. They are not denying that he is a Hizb militant. It is also a fact that there were cases against him,” Mr. Kumar told The Hindu.
According to the police, Liaquat was wanted in a case registered in Jammu and Kashmir in 2011.
The Delhi Police said it was an incontrovertible fact that Liaquat was in Pakistan and that he had boarded a flight from Karachi to Nepal. “If he is not a Pakistani national, on which passport did he travel by air to Nepal? During interrogation, he disclosed that he had been provided with a Pakistani passport, which he, following instructions from his handlers, destroyed immediately after reaching Kathmandu,” said another senior officer.
Liaquat boarded a bus from Kathmandu and was dropped near the Indian border. “From there, he took a rickshaw to cross over to India. Had he expressed his plans to surrender, there was no need for him to surreptitiously sneak into the country. When he was arrested, he did not reveal that anyone else was travelling with him. Asked to whom his arrest should be communicated, he gave the phone number of his wife living in Jammu and Kashmir,” said the officer.
The police claim that they have also seized a ticket from the accused which shows that he took a bus from Mansehra, where, according to Indian agencies, the Hizb has been running a terror camp, to Islamabad. They alleged that Liaquat told the interrogators about his purported meetings with Hizb chief Syed Salahuddin and that he used to meet the outfit’s launching commander, codenamed Bahadur Khan.
“It is also a fact that Liaquat had sustained bullet injuries in the legs during a face-off with security forces in the Kashmir Valley,” said the officer.
The Delhi Police had claimed that Liaquat was arrested in Gorakhpur and at his instance they raided the guesthouse room where the person whom Liaquat was supposed to meet, on the instructions of his handlers, had been putting up.
“The guesthouse has CCTVs installed on all the floors, but the suspect who was staying on the third floor was wearing a cap all the time to evade identification,” the sources said.
