Malegaon blast accused on Simi hit list: govt report

Colonel Prasad Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Dayanand Pandey, the three accused in the Sept 2008 Malegaon blast case, are on the hit list of the Students Islamic Movement of India. Rajesh Ahuja reports.

Colonel Prasad Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Thakur and Dayanand Pandey, the three accused in the September 2008 Malegaon blast case, are on the hit list of the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi).

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According to a government report based on intelligence inputs from central agencies and various state police forces, the Simi activists intend to rope in underworld contacts to execute their plan. Besides the three Malegaon blast case accused, a Hindu leader in Pune and a lawyer in Bhiwandi are also on the list of targets.

The three accused – Purohit, Pragya and Pandey – have been in judicial custody since they were arrested by the Mumbai Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) for the Malegaon blast in November 2008. The blast took place on September 7, 2008. At present, the National

Investigation Agency (NIA) is probing the case.

In the past, SIMI activists had hatched plans to assassinate the accused in the 2002 Gujarat riots case as well as three judges of the Allahabad high court, who pronounced the verdict in the Babri Masjid case in 2010. This is for the first time that government agencies have stumbled upon a plan to target accused persons in Hindu terror cases.

The report also claimed that SIMI regularly tries to establish links with terror outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). A SIMI activist, identified as Mohammad Azazuddin, had visited Saudi Arabia in November 2010, followed by Bangladesh in February 2011, to meet a JeM operative called Wali Hassan.

Wali Hasan is based in Saudi Arabia.