Mangaluru blast suspect shifted to Bengaluru hospital

Mangaluru police commissioner N Shashi Kumar said Shariq was shifted as per the suggestions of the hospital doctors and authorities since he needed specialised treatment.

The prime suspect in the Mangaluru bomb blast, Mohammed Shariq, 24, was shifted to Bengaluru on Saturday for treatment, police said.

Shariq sustained around 45% burn injuries in a low-intensity blast that was reported on November 19. Senior officers didn’t disclose the location of treatment in Bengaluru but said he was transported to the capital city around 6 am on Saturday (PTI)

Mangaluru police commissioner N Shashi Kumar said Shariq was shifted as per the suggestions of the hospital doctors and authorities since he needed specialised treatment.

Shariq sustained around 45% burn injuries in a low-intensity blast that was reported on November 19. Senior officers didn’t disclose the location of treatment in Bengaluru but said he was transported to the capital city around 6 am on Saturday. “NIA and police have questioned him but he still has medical complications, particularly from the smoke he has inhaled following the blast. His ability to speak was also limited by that,” said a senior police officer.

On November 19, an explosion was reported in an auto-rickshaw in Mangaluru, injuring the driver and the passenger. A day after the blast in Mangaluru, in which two people including Shariq were injured, state police chief Praveen Sood on November 20 had declared the incident an “act of terror with the intention to cause serious damage”.

A case was booked under Section 120 (b) and 307 IPC along with the Explosive Substances Act at the Kankanady town police station. Both the auto-rickshaw driver and the accused were shifted to a private hospital in Mangaluru.

During the probe, police identified Shariq as the bomber. According to police, videos on how to make a bike bomb, and a cooker bomb were recovered from Shariq’s phone. The investigation pointed out that the nature of the IED shows that the group didn’t have large funding or support. Police identified the material used to make the IED has potassium chlorate, which is used to manufacture match boxes and crackers.

The police have recovered 150 matchboxes, sulphur powder and gunpowder from a Mysuru house where Shariq had stayed earlier.

Chief minister Basavaraj Bommai on Friday asked the Congress leadership to clarify their stand on terrorism. The chief minister was reacting to Karnataka Congress president D K Shivakumar’s statement suggesting that the Mangaluru pressure cooker blast was orchestrated by the BJP government to divert attention away from the voter data theft scandal.

Shivakumar on Thursday said that the BJP government and the director general of police(DGP) Praveen Sood are damaging the state’s image on a global level. KPCC president also said that the Mangaluru blast was declared a terror activity without an investigation.

Shivakumar said, “Hours after the Mangaluru blast, the ruling government and DGP immediately declared it a terrorist activity without any investigation, as if it was similar to the Mumbai terror attack. How can the police call someone a terrorist without even a basic investigation? If it was a terror attack, why did not they immediately hand over the case to National Investigation Agency (NIA). BJP government is used to diverting the main issues by creating panic among the public.”

On November 30, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had officially took over the investigation into the Mangaluru blast investigation from the Karnataka police. The suspect Shariq was earlier arrested in December 2020 after pro-terror graffiti was found on a wall and a building in Mangaluru. His associate Mazz Muneer Ahmed, aka, Mazz, who was then 21-year-old was also arrested in the same case, police said.

Police also suspect that Shariq used some of the money raised for his legal fight after his arrest in 2020 in the pro-terror case to buy the equipment used to make the bomb.

In September 2022, Shariq’s name had also cropped up in another terror-related case. On September 23, Shivamogga police had said that two associates of a person arrested in connection with a stabbing during a clash over Hindutva ideologue V D Savarkar’s poster in Shivamogga on August 15 have links to the Islamic State.

One of the four arrested men had named Mazz as an associate, police said. When police took Mazz into custody, he told police that he along with Shariq had conducted trial bomb blasts on the banks of Tungabhadra river.

Since he is involved in multiple cases, Karnataka police and NIA are looking into the cases, said senior officers.