Delhi Police move IB to bail out informer Naqi from ATS custody

The Delhi Police are leaving no stone unturned, not to detain a terrorist, but to help get a businessman suspected of being one bailed out of the custody of their counterparts in Mumbai.

The Delhi Police are leaving no stone unturned, not to detain a terrorist, but to help get a businessman suspected of being one bailed out of the custody of their counterparts in Mumbai.

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More than 10 days after the Mahrashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) arrested him in a 'false case of cheating', lawyers engaged by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) at the behest of the Delhi Police are in Mumbai to bail out Mohammad Naqi, a Delhi police informer.

"We had communicated information about the ATS' attempts at botching up our investigations into the 13/7 serial blasts in Mumbai to the IB and requested that Naqi, who has no role except that of an informer, be bailed out," said a senior police officer.

According to sources in the special team, which had carried-out a month-long operation to track Indian Mujahideen (IM) kingpin Yasin Bhatkal alias Shahrukh and two Pakistani bombers, Waqas and Tabrez, in Mumbai, Naqi has been wrongly implicated.

"We will stand by Naqi, who is a businessman from Shaheen Bagh and was sharing information with us. We have proof of this," the officer said.

Rejecting the ATS' allegations against their operation in Mumbai's Byculla (east), special team sources said they had been on Bhatkal's trail ever since they intercepted a phone call by Shahrukh, from Bihar's Madhubani, to the owner of a flat where he and the Pakistani bombers had stayed on November 1.

Police said Shahrukh's preferred alias 'Dr. Imran' had been instrumental in ascertaining his presence at the said flat, which Naqi had helped him procure from a widow, Rubina.

"Wherever he went, whether it was in Darbhanga in Bihar, at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi and even the rented accommodation in Byculla, Shahrukh had introduced himself as Dr. Imran, a homeopathic doctor from Patna," said the officer.

However, it was only once —at Chennai's Selaiyur — where he had claimed to be Dr Shoaib while seeking a rented accommodation soon after the Mumbai serial blasts on July 13.

The special team had reached Mumbai on December 10 and, with Naqi's help, was able to identify the flat where Shahrukh and the two Pakistani bombers had been staying on rent before the serial blasts on July 13.

Located in Habib Building near Palace Cinema in Mumbai's Byculla (east), the Delhi Police team was staying at a rented flat just a kilometre away from the trio's former hideout.