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Police foil IS-inspired strikes in Delhi, Assam
Police said the trio was inspired by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group and its immediate target was the ongoing Raas Mahotsav in Assam on Monday.
Delhi Police, in a joint operation with Assam Police, claimed to have foiled a 2016 Bangladesh-style terror attack — in which 20 people were killed by Islamic State gunmen who stormed an upscale restaurant in Dhaka — with the arrest of three men from Assam’s Goalpara district on Sunday.
Police said the trio was inspired by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group and its immediate target was the ongoing Raas Mahotsav in Assam on Monday. They had planned to carry out IED blasts as well as stab devotees attending the 15-day-long festival in Goalpara, police added.
A local court in Assam has sent the accused — Luit Zameel Zaman,24; Mukadir Islam,22; and Ranjeet Islam, 24 — to 10-day custody of the state police. Police are probing further to identify the trio’s handlers and accomplices in Delhi and other states.
Police said the arrested men were allegedly in touch with three or four other people in the Capital to also carry out terror strikes in New Delhi’s crowded markets or restaurants having high footfall.
Deputy commissioner of police (special cell) Pramod Singh Kushwaha said one ready-to-use improvised explosive device (IED), similar to the one allegedly used by suspected IS terrorists in the 2017 Bhopal-Ujjain passenger train blast in which 10 people were injured, was recovered from them.
Two daggers were also seized, which the trio had allegedly planned to use to stab devotees on the concluding day of the Raas Mahotsav, the DCP said.
One kilogram of explosive powder, IED components such as pipes, nails, ball-bearings, batteries and timers, along with four cellphones with evidence of planning of the terror strikes, and videos related to the IS were also seized, Kushwaha added.
Police said the three were “self-radicalised” and “inspired” by the ideologies of IS’s Bangladesh module, adding that they suspect the trio was triggered by recent developments such as Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), the scrapping of provisions of Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir, and the Supreme Court’s verdict on Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid title dispute.
The terror attacks in Assam and Delhi had been planned on the lines of the 2016 Bangladesh terrorist attack in which seven suspected IS terrorists stormed an upscale restaurant in Dhaka and killed 20 patrons, including foreigners, they said.
Kushwaha said the suspects had been under surveillance for four to five months, adding that the special cell sleuths recently learnt that this group of three-four persons had already assembled a few IEDs after watching videos on the internet.
Police said that to avoid detection, the arrested men were using “encrypted conversation” feature of various internet-based messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
Zaman worked as a supervisor in an Aadhaar enrollment centre in Assam; Ranjeet was working as a manager with a fish trading company, while Mukadir worked as a driver and was also into fish farming. They knew each other since school, the police said.
