After 24 years of manhunt, the CBI has arrested Mushtaq Ahmed, a key accused in the 1993 bombing of RSS’ Chennai headquarters. Eleven persons were killed in the explosion. Ahmed, 56, was arrested on Friday morning from the outskirts of Chennai. The blast triggered using RDX brought down the multi-storey RSS office at Chetput in Chennai on August 8, 1993.
The agency had announced a reward of Rs 10 lakh for providing credible information about him. Ahmed had allegedly procured the explosive material for assembling the bomb and provided shelter to other accused persons. A TADA court in Chennai had convicted 11 persons and awarded life term to three of them in 2007 after a 12-year trial.
The agency was entrusted with the probe in 1993, and it filed charge sheet against 18 persons on June 8, 1994 under the stringent Terrorist and Destructive Activities Act (TADA), provisions of the Indian Penal Code and Explosive Substances Act.
After the trial, the special court in 2007 had acquitted four persons, including SA Basha, founder of the banned al-Ummah for lack of evidence against them. Immam Ali, a suspected ISI agent who had escaped from custody in Madurai, was gunned down in Bangalore in an encounter with the police on September 29, 2002, while another accused-- Jihad Committee Founder Palani Baba-- was hacked to death by suspected RSS sympathisers on January 28, 1997. Of the 431 witnesses, 224 were examined during the course of the trial which commenced on August 7, 1995.