Delhi police nabs Zia Ur Rehman, avert major terror strike

NEW DELHI: The weekend arrest of Zia Ur Rehman alias Waqas, alleged to be the deputy of Indian Mujahideen’s current chief Tehseen Akhtar and a Pakistani bomb maker, has come at an opportune time for the government, which on Sunday claimed it as a testimony of its action against terror. Delhi police said it arrested the 24-year-old from Ajmer railway station on Saturday morning following information from Intelligence Bureau that he had boarded a train to the Rajasthani city from Bandra in Mumbai.

Based on information given by Waqas during initial interrogation, police said they arrested three of his associates including two aspiring engineers from Jaipur and Jodhpur in the early hours of Sunday. The police claimed to have seized a huge cache of explosives and bombmaking material, which Delhi Police Special Commissioner SN Srivastava said could have been used for targeting any important event, including the upcoming elections. They may have been targeting political rallies or foreign tourists, officials said.

"A spectacular terror strike has been averted," a Delhi police statement said on Sunday. The arrests just ahead of elections gave a chance for the government to blunt BJP’s allegations of it being "weak on terror." "Congratulate Delhi Police, intelligence agencies on arrests of terror suspects," Minister of State for Home RPN Singh wrote on micro blogging site Twitter. "…our focus is action, not rhetoric."

Security agencies had arrested two top IM operatives, Yasin Bhatkal and Asadullah Akhtar, from Nepal last year. A country-wide operation is ongoing to arrest other IM masterminds given the threat they pose to the Lok Sabha elections, senior home ministry officials told ET, claiming that security agencies were closing in on Tehseen Akhtar.

Meanwhile, the home ministry said Waqas was not targeting BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi. "There is no threat to Modi. We have already upgraded his security. Modi ko koi dar nahi hai (Modi has nothing to fear)," Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said. BJP leaders had met Shinde last week saying their leaders were under terror threat. But Shinde told them that he had got no such intelligence inputs.




Waqas’ is the first big-ticket arrest of Pakistanis working for the IM, which mostly recruits Indians to its cadre, sources said. According to police, he hails from Mustafabad in Pakistan. Police officials said Waqas was chosen by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba to join the IM in India given his "deep expertise" in bomb-making.

He was put on a flight to Kathmandu in September 2010 along with Asadullah Akhtar, who was returning from Pakistan after getting training there, they said, adding that the two were then brought to Darbhanga in Bihar. Waqas is accused of fabricating bombs and participating in planting them at Jama Masjid, Delhi (2010), Varanasi (2010), Mumbai (2011), Pune (2012) and Hyderabad (2013). Since Bhatkal’s arrest last year, he had been hiding in a couple of states, officials said.