Can the CBI do what police didn't - find scapegoats?

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: Bowing to pressure from a section of the Congress, Leftists and Muslim community members, the Maharashtra government on Thursday decided to handover the investigations of the Malegaon blast to the CBI. The move comes in the backdrop of a series of allegations about police harassment of minorities.

The development will not be good news for the state’s police force (which claims to have cracked the case) as the announcement came barely hours after the Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra police filed a chargesheet in a special court against nine persons involved in the serial blasts.

The ATS filed the chargesheet in a Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act court against nine persons who have been arrested so far in connection with the blasts and said that four more persons were wanted in the case. One of the wanted persons is a Pakistani national identified as Muzzamil, the chargesheet said.

The ATS also produced accused Abrar Ahmed in the court and he was then remanded to judicial custody by designated judge Mrudula Bhatkar. The other eight accused are currently in judicial custody and the court directed that they should be present in court on Friday when they will be given copies of the chargesheet.

Thirty-seven people were killed and 56 were seriously injured when three bombs concealed on cycles went off near a mosque in Maharashtra’s Malegaon town when people were coming out after Friday afternoon prayers. The blasts occurred near the Hamidia Mosque in the Bada Kabristan area of the communally-sensitive town.

The Maharashtra police has been maintaining that it was part of a jehadi plot and the black RDX used in the blasts is known to be of the ‘Peshawari’ variety. The police, which had to encounter suggestions that Hindu groups were behind the blasts, had completed the investigation and was in the process of filing the chargesheet.

The police’s claim that the Malegaon plot was hatched by radical Islamic outfit Simi had angered some community leaders. They hit out at the state government and alleged that members of the minority community were being harassed by the police. This forced Ms Sonia Gandhi and the home minister Shivraj Patil to sent directives to the state government for being more mindful of the sensitivities of the minority community.

The police made a breakthrough in the case with the arrest of a Simi activist Noor-ul-Huda Shamshudoha Ansari, who allegedly planted one of the bombs. In his confessions to the police, Ansari revealed that Shabbir Batterywala and Nafeez Ansari were involved in the attack.

According to the police, both Shabbir and Nafeez had travelled to Pakistan via Dubai on a tourist visa for terror training in May 2003. Shabbir spent 26 days in a terrorist camp in Bhawalpur — the camp run by number 2 in the LeT Azeem Cheema — where his two handlers were named Mashar and Sufi.