New Delhi:
As possible links are seen between the Hyderabad blasts on Thursday evening and the serial blasts in Pune last August, one of the key names to emerge from an intricate network of terror is that of Sayed Maqbool an alleged bomb-maker for the terror group Indian Mujahideen.
(Read)The Delhi Police announced Maqbool's arrest in October last year saying it had managed to nab him after considerable effort from Hyderabad. They describe him as an Improvised Explosives Device or IED trainer who had trained alleged members of an Indian Mujahideen or IM module that it said it busted in August with the arrest of four men.
The arrests, they said, solved the Pune blasts case. Sustained interrogation of the four accused, especially a 31-year-old man called Imran Khan, led to the chase and arrest of Maqbool. All the four men, like Maqbool, belong to Maharashtra; both Imran and Maqbool are from Nanded district in that state. Maqbool allegedly taught the others how to make bombs using urea, diesel and fire cracker powder at a farmhouse in Aurangabad
Sayed Maqbool is also said to have facilitated a reconnaissance of possible locations for terror strikes in Hyderabad; on a motorcycle, Imran and he allegedly roamed crowded marketplaces like Begum Bazaar, Abid's and even Dilsukhnagar, where the two blasts killed 16 people and injured over 100 last evening. The recces, the police claimed, were done at the behest of Riyaz Bhatkal, believed to be one of the founder members of the IM.
A few days later, the module allegedly struck at Pune, chosen by the Bhatkals as the site of strike instead of the Buddhist town of Gaya in Bihar.
Maqbool began a life of crime, the police said, with three murders in Andhra Pradesh. He was convicted for life in the first murder, and it is unclear how or why his sentence was commuted, but he was released from jail in 2009. His motives for murder, according to the police, ranged from encroachment of land for a mosque, to robbery.
He is also reported to have formed a terror organisation in his village, Mancharia, called the Indian Muslim Mohammadin Mujahidin, in 1999. They allegedly worked under the garb of a social organisation. It was then that Maqbool learnt bomb-making, according to the police, with the unstated purpose of blowing up movie threatres that filmed pornographic films. He is accused of having played a role in a series of explosions.