Delhi Police Special Cell sleuths on Saturday took a man — arrested for possessing arms and claimed to be “highly radicalised” — to his native Hyderabad for a confrontation with the organisers of two madrasas the police had questioned earlier. A senior police officer confirmed the development.
Special Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Arvind Deep told The Hindu on Saturday that the probe into the suspected terror links of Rehmat and his alleged plans to launch an attack in Delhi were at “a crucial stage”.
Rehmat was arrested earlier this week while carrying two firearms and seven live cartridges. However, intelligence inputs and Rehmat’s custodial interrogation purportedly expanded the realm of the probe.
This led the police teams to two different cities — Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly and Telangana’s Capital Hyderabad — over the next few days, where revelations about the alleged radicalisation of the 27-year-old were made.
Among those the Special Cell teams spoke to included Rehmat’s family members in Hyderabad who disclosed that he consumed a lot of radical content. His newly-found fundamentalist streak was further fanned by material on the Islamic State available on the web.
“They also disclosed that he was in touch with another youth from Hyderabad, who we are looking for now. The man introduced him to two maulanas in Bareilly. We suspect the maulanas had contacts with anti-India elements in Pakistan like the Jaish-e-Mohammad network and was further influenced. The maulanas had tasked him with the job of radicalising other youths and that he would receive instruction on carrying out some operations,” said a source.
The maulanas are also alleged to have provided the weapons to Rehmat and the aforementioned “operation” could be launching a terror attack in the Capital or other parts of the country, the police suspect. A senior Uttar Pradesh police officer in Bareilly, however, said that he had no knowledge about Delhi Police teams camping in the city or questioning anyone there in connection with terror links.
Meanwhile in the Hyderabad leg of the investigations, the police conducted raids at two madrasas in the city and questioned Maulana Mufti Zakir Hussain and Hafeez Hasan Noori, two names that had purportedly come up during Rehmat’s custodial interrogation. The two, however, recalled meeting Rehmat for discussing the setting up of a website.
The case thus far remains one under the Arms Act with no terror charges till Saturday and no accomplices have been named in the case either. Despite acknowledging the radicalisation angle, another Special Cell source said a proper network to launch a terror attack had not been traced so far and the idea of a lone man with two firearms launching a terror attack was “far fetched”.
Rehmat’s custodial interrogation purportedly expanded the realm of the probe and led police teams to Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly and Telangana’s Hyderabad
