SRINAGAR, Nov 14: At least three people were detained on Monday in held Kashmir in connection with New Delhi’s bombings, following the arrest of the alleged mastermind last week. Police from New Delhi raided several places in Srinagar over the October 29 Delhi blasts that killed 62 people, said local police.
They said a man identified as Mohammad Hanif was arrested in the city’s congested old district of Kawadara and two to three other people were picked up elsewhere for questioning.
The latest raids follow the capture of alleged mastermind Tariq Dar, a suspected member of Lashkar-i-Taiba, in Srinagar on Thursday.
Dar, who has not been charged, was linked to the blasts at two crowded markets and a bus through phone taps and bank records, newspaper reports in New Delhi and police said.
Dar is an employee of a pharmaceutical division and a father who had broken links to a militant group as a teenager. His arrest surprised family members and a journalist who interviewed him for a book on Kashmir.
“When I last met him in December 2002, he had just got engaged to be married. He was, like anybody his age, excited about his first love,” recalled journalist Pradeep Thakur in the Times of India.
Dar also used occasionally to write for a Kashmiri magazine called Mount Valley.
Now in his thirties, Dar apparently started out selling creams, bandages and baby oil from town to town until he was promoted and given sales responsibility for the entire valley, newspapers said.
A spokeswoman for the firm confirmed that Dar worked for it but gave no further details on his employment with them.
Dar went to Delhi on October 5 to receive a sales excellence award from his company, his wife told reporters. But police say he was also planning the deadly blasts.
On Sunday police said they noted Dar as a suspect after finding a debit card bill for a hotel stay in the first week of October.
They followed up by reviewing his bank account details, which according to police showed that a wire transfer of almost 500,000 rupees had been made by a person based in the Middle East days before the blast.
Police said a subsequent tapped mobile phone conversation to Pakistan, during which Dar spoke about the blasts, confirmed their suspicions.
“We’ve got the transcript of the conversation. After that there wasn’t any doubt left in our mind,” an unnamed investigating officer told the Hindustan Times daily.—AFP
