Samir Sardana's mail talks of serial blasts in India, says Goa DGP

PANAJI: Goa Police are verifying if Samir Sardana, the son of a decorated former major general of Indian Army who has been in police custody for the last six days, was planning to conduct serial blasts in India. An email letter recovered from his laptop and decoded by the Anti-Terrorist Squad ( ATS) talks of serial blasts in India, Goa DGP T N Mohan told TOI.

Sardana (44), who has otherwise been evasive, has denied this though, saying he has not written any such letter. We have got an email but we have not been able to identify the recipient of the email. It is being cross-checked," Mohan said.

A senior officer said Sardana has all the information related to previous bomb blasts in the country. "Sardana is not able to explain about the letter which talks about serial blasts in the country in the future," he said. During the last one year, Sardana travelled to Mumbai, Pune and Goa frequently. Sleuths recovered maps of vital installations, including IOC dumps, from Sardana's laptop. He has been questioned by sleuths of National Investigating Agency (NIA), Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Goa Police for the last six days. On Saturday he was taken to the Institute of Psychiatric and Human Behaviour (IPHB), Bambolim, for a psychiatric analysis. Police said doctors told them he was normal. ATS has also recovered some journals from him which give information on how to make improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and chemical composition for making bombs. "Sardana has not answered why he has collected those journals," a senior ATS officer said.

Sardana arrived in India in December 2014 and visited vital installations in Mumbai, Pune and Goa. "He was walking around the vital installations," the officer said and added that ATS was investigating who was in touch with him and from where he managed his finances.

The officer said Sardana has been telling his interrogators that he is a management consultant but has failed to explain who his clients are. He said three of the five passports recovered from Sardana were issued abroad with additional pages. "Sardana has travelled in the Middle East and other countries mostly on the passports which were issued abroad," he added.

Sources said all seven phones recovered from Sardana are old Nokia phones with little storage capacity. It is hard to recover the data as there is no storage space on cell phones, the sources added.