A day after the arrest of a Pakistan national by the Delhi Police Special Cell for allegedly planning a terror attack in the city, senior police officers said the accused, Mohd. Ashraf, may have played a role in the 2011 Delhi High Court bomb blast case in which 17 persons were killed and more than 80 injured.
According to a highly placed source, the accused had “conducted a recce” of the High Court premises after contacting one of the suspects in the case, who gave him instructions to conduct recces at other spots with high footfalls in the city. “We showed him several pictures of the prime suspects in the High Court blast and he identified Gulam Sarvar, one of the prime suspects in the case,” a senior police officer claimed.
Gulam Sarvar, also known as Abu Bilal (33), is a native of Pakistan and remains absconding in the case. He is one of the main accused who has been charged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for planning and carrying out the terror attack 10 years back on September 7.
“At this point, we suspect him of having a role in the attack as he has named one of the accused, but investigation is ongoing to ascertain his actual involvement in the incident,” the officer said.
The officer claimed that during interrogation, he also identified a few accused involved in the 2009 bomb blast at the bus station in Jammu which was carried out by the ISI.
In both the incidents, sources claimed that while they suspect him of having a role, concrete material evidence is yet to be recovered and will be probed in the coming days. He had been remanded to 14 days’ police custody by a Delhi court in an in camera hearing on Tuesday.
Sources have claimed that the accused had also conducted recee at over eight locations in the capital a few years before the 2011 blast. “The areas included prime locations like India Gate, Kashmere Gate, Red Fort and the Old Delhi Police Headquarters at ITO,” an officer said. Ashraf has also named three of his accomplices who were planning the terror attack, a source said.
Earlier, DCP (Special Cell) Pramod Khushwah had said Mohd. Ashraf, who lived under the name of Ali Ahmed Noori, in East Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar, was an active part of a sleeper cell node and has carried out many terror attacks and espionage activities in India in the last several years.
The police had said Ashraf had been assigned to carry out a terror strike during the festive season at the behest of the ISI. After being trained by an ISI handler code named Nasir in 2004, he managed to enter India through Siliguri border and befriended a maulvi of a local mosque, along with whom he came to Delhi. Thereafter, he started working as a daily wager at factories with the help of the maulvi’s relatives and stayed in touch with Nasir.
Recently, he was tasked to orchestrate a terror strike in the festival season, the police said, adding that all the weapons and ammunition recovered from him are imported and were smuggled from the Indo-Pak border.
