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Bail rejected, Madhani’s wife held
The Kerala police on Thursday arrested Sufia Madhani, wife of Muslim cleric Abdul Nasser Madhani, after the Kerala High Court rejected her bail plea in a bus-burning case.
The Kerala police on Thursday arrested Sufia Madhani, wife of Muslim cleric Abdul Nasser Madhani, after the Kerala High Court rejected her bail plea in a bus-burning case.
Justice K.T. Sankaran of the high court, while dismissing her plea, observed that the charges against her were serious.
A Tamil Nadu government bus was torched in 2005 on the outskirts of Kochi, 230 km north of Thiruvananthapuram, in protest against the alleged ill-treatment meted out to Madhani in the Coimbatore jail.
Sufia is the tenth accused in the case.
At the time of the incident, Madhani was an undertrial in the Coimbatore blasts case. Later, he was acquitted by the court.
The blasts in Coimbatore took place in February 1998.
The case came into public view again after suspected Lakshar-e-Tayyeba operative Thadiyantavide Nazeer, who was arrested recently in Bangladesh and handed over to the authorities in India, reportedly confessed to his involvement.
He told the police that he was in touch with Sufia when the incident took place.
Nazeer is the first accused in the case.
Nazeer reportedly told his interrogators that he was a camp follower of Madhani and maintained good relations with him even after the latter’s arrest.
Besides the attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on December 28, 2005, in which a mathematics professor of IIT-Delhi, M.C. Puri, was killed, Nazeer was allegedly involved in several terrorist activities, apart from the bus-torching incident.
Sufia’s counsel V. Chidambaresh said she was arrested at the behest of some top police officers and politicians.
