The Delhi police have reignited a debate on the actual perpetrators of the 2006 Mumbai train blasts that killed 189 people.
A press release issued by a special cell of the police on Monday said that “on 11 July, 2006, SIMI/IM executed serial blasts in local trains in Mumbai”, contradicting the findings of the Mumbai police and the subsequent conviction by a local court.
Seven bombs went off on the suburban trains during peak hours, in one of the biggest terrorist attacks in Indian history. Ten days later, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested 12 people with alleged allegiance to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. In 2015, they were convicted. Six of them were sentenced to death.
IM group’s claim
However, there have occasionally been questions about the claims of ATS and the court conviction. Two Indian Mujahideen operatives — Mohammad Sadiq Israr Sheikh, who was arrested in 2008 by the Mumbai Crime Branch, and Yasin Bhatkal, who was arrested by the Delhi Police in 2013 — have said that the blasts were carried out by their group. Now adding a new twist and raising more questions about the conviction of the 12 accused, the Delhi police say that Abdul Subahan Qureshi, alias Tauqeer, who is identified as one of the founders of the Indian Mujahideen and ideologue of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India, was involved in the blasts.
Alleging Qureshi’s hand in a series of bomb blasts from 2006 to 2013, the police’s press release said, “On 11 July, 2006, SIMI/IM executed serial blasts in local trains in Mumbai. Subsequently Tauqeer’s [an alias used by Qureshi] name figured in this case and he fled from Mumbai to Karnataka. SIMI and IM together wanted to carry out widespread terror activities.”
A retired senior RAW official told The Hindu that the agency was always suspicious of ATS claims. “Our initial inputs were credible and had shown links to the Bihar border. However, the ATS in no time changed the script and came up with this filmi claim,” he said.
Initial cases
One of the first cases in which Qureshi was arrested was in 1988 when he was booked for defacing public property with a poster on Babri Masjid. He then moved to the Delhi headquarters of SIMI where he published its monthly magazine, Islamic Movement .
