This Article is From Aug 31, 2013

Yasin Bhatkal? This isn't him, says his lawyer in Delhi court

Yasin Bhatkal? This isn't him, says his lawyer in Delhi court

Yasin Bhatkal was arrested in Bihar on Wednesday night.

New Delhi: Yasin Bhatkal, accused of heading terror group Indian Mujahideen and engineering some of India's most deadly terror attacks, was produced in a Delhi court today surrounded by a ring of security after being flown in from Patna on a special plane.

His lawyer said that the man arrested is named Mohammed Ahmed, and has wrongly been identified as one of India's 12 most-wanted men by intelligence officers. "It is for the agencies to prove now that he is Bhatkal. He is not, and they have no evidence," said MS Khan, defence lawyer.

Bhaktal's real name is Ahmed Siddibappa; Yasin Bhatkal was one of the aliases he used.

In a closed-door hearing, the judge, assigned Bhatkal's custody for the next 12 days to the National Investigation Agency, ruling that "custody is required to unearth the larger conspiracy to affect the recovery related to the instant case and getting leads to arrest 10 more absconding accused persons."

Bhatkal, who is believed to be 30, was arrested in Northern Bihar on Wednesday night in a top-secret operation of the Bihar Police and the Intelligence Bureau, which had been tracking him for nearly six months, partly through phone calls to his wife in Delhi and other relatives in his home town in Karnataka.

Bhatkal was arrested along with another alleged Mujahideen member, Asadullah Akhtar, 225 km from the state capital of Patna.

He is wanted in 12 states. Intelligence agencies say his most recent strike was February's twin bomb blasts in Hyderabad, in which 16 people were killed and 80 injured.

In 2010, he was spotted on security camera footage recovered after a bomb exploded at the German Bakery in Pune. His face covered partially by a cap, he was seen leaving behind a bag that contained the bomb. 17 people died in that attack.

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