New Delhi, Sep 14: Even as the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday doubled the reward money to Rs 10 lakh for any information on the Delhi High Court blast, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram has hinted at the involvement of homegrown terror groups.
Speaking to BBC, Chidambaram has said it is likely that the Delhi High Court blast was carried out by militants based in India. “We can no longer point to cross-border terrorism as a source of terror attacks in India,” he said. Regarding the Mumbai and Pune attacks, he said “we are fairly certain they were carried out by Indian modules or India-based modules.”
“That threat (Pakistan) remains — but we must also look at Indian modules or India-based modules which are capable of carrying out terror attacks. The government can build capacity and extend the intelligence network, but policing is a very complex task and there will be cases where the terrorist is able to slip through the cracks,” he told BBC.
Meanwhile, the NIA today sent the hard disk seized from the cyber cafe in Kishtwar — from where the first e-mail (harkatuljihadi2011@ gmail.com) claiming responsibility for the blast was sent — for forensic examination to CFSL Delhi.
The second and fourth e-mails (chootominani5@ gmail.com) were traced to Kolkata, where one person, Sunny Sharma, is being questioned. Sharma has reportedly said that he created the e-mail account but denied sending the terror e-mail. Sources said his e-mail account appears to have been hacked twice.
“It is possible that his account was operated by someone else. We are examining the details provided by the Kolkata police. It has also been found that he created another account on Yahoo using the same id,” said an NIA official.
A senior STF official in Kolkata said the SIM card, which was reportedly used to send the e-mails, is registered with a private service provider in Kolkata.
The STF has also detained two persons from Arambag — 18-year-old Souvick Sahani of Dashinpara, Mohanpur and 26-year-old Prabir Kundu of Ratnapally.
“We picked up the suspected persons as the IP address of the emails were traced to their places. They were detained for an inquiry. But we did not find anything significant and we did not arrest them,” said Rajiv Kumar, Assistant Commissioner of Police, STF.
Another person, Mohammad Afzal Sayed from Bagnan in Howrah district, was arrested after he was detected with splinter injuries on his hand and face.
In Ahmedabad, Monu Oza, 24, arrested for allegedly sending the third e-mail claiming responsibility for the blast, has been sent to police remand for four days.
The forensic report regarding the nature of explosives had been delayed and is expected to take a few more days. The agency has asked the Gandhinagar CFSL to reconcile the forensic reports given by different laboratories after there were contradictory reports.
