Man with ‘al Qaida links’ arrested from Hooghly

KOLKATA: The Bengal Special Task force (STF) on Tuesday morning arrested the fourth suspected member of a radical organization from Hooghly district on charges of carrying anti-state activities.
The accused, Nasimuddin Sk, a resident of Khargram in Murshidabad, reportedly belongs to the banned terrorist outfit, al Qaida in Indian Sub-Continent (AQIS), an affiliate group of al Qaida and its modules, said cops.
According to senior officers, the accused was nabbed from Dadpur in Hooghly. Three other accused of the case had been arrested from Kharibari under Shasan police station in August last year.
“We had initially arrested Abdur Rakib Sarkar alias Habibullah who hails from Gangarampur of Dakshin Dinajpur. The second accused, Kazi Ahsan Uiilah alias Hasan (32), hails from Arambagh in Hooghly but was recently staying at Panchannagram off Topsia in Kolkata. We questioned them and then got to know about Nasimuddin,” said an investigating officer.
“We have arrested the accused based on a tip-off. There are charges against the accused under the UAPA sections along with IPC sections. We probed the linkages of the accused arrested previously with certain people in a couple of south Bengal districts,” said SP (operations) Indrajit Basu.
The fresh arrests of AQIS members came after a gap of five years — the arrests in the intervening period are mostly linked to the JMB. “The fact that these men are affiliated to the Ansarullah Bangla team (ABT) that has connections with AQIS and has a thin presence in east India cannot be ruled out. We will produce the accused in court and take them into police custody to understand their exact operations,” said an officer.
Though never a force in India, AQIS on June 7 last year had threatened suicide attacks in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai and Delhi amid brewing controversy over the remarks by a couple of former BJP leaders.