"We had absolutely no clues after the 7/11 blasts but small steps helped us unravel the case," Mumbai police commissioner A N Roy said.
MUMBAI: "We had absolutely no clues after the 7/11 blasts but small, simple, logical steps helped us unravel the case," Mumbai police commissioner A N Roy said on Sunday. The investigators got their first clue when telephone call analysis revealed that someone from Navi Mumbai was making four to five mobile-to-mobile calls a day to a place on the Bihar-Nepal border before and after the blasts on July 11.
The man making the calls, Mumtaz Chaudhuri (32), an Arabic teacher in Ghansoli, Navi Mumbai, had no police record. In fact, he had a perfect alibi. He said he was speaking to his brother-in-law, Kamaal Ansari, a resident of Madhubani district in Bihar. It was only when the antecedents of Ansari were checked with the Intelligence Bureau (IB) that the police realised they had a proper lead.
Ansari (36) was a known operative of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, who had been to Pakistan for arms training. He had been arrested by the New Delhi police in 2002 for possessing an AK-47 rifle. Ansari, once a tailor in New Delhi, was jobless but managed to support a wife and two children, apparently by selling toys. Digging further into his past, the IB realised that Ansari's real job was to escort Pakistani militants across the India-Nepal and India-Pakistan borders. He was the one who had escorted two of the 11 Pakistanis involved in the 7/11 blasts from Nepal to Patna on May 25 and then travelled with them to Mumbai in an unreserved train compartment.
Ansari was arrested and flown in to Mumbai in an air force plane. His interrogation provided the police with vital early leads. Another vital clue came from the forensic experts of the National Security Guards, who recovered three pressure cooker handles from three of the blast sites. Soon, chemical analysis of the dustings from the blasted train compartments and a study of the damage done to the compartment by the National Bomb Data Centre revealed that each bomb contained around 2.5 kg of RDX and was placed in a pressure cooker. The Mumbai police matched it with information from interrogated suspects and quickly zeroed in on the shops from where the cookers were bought. The shopkeepers remembered the buyers as they were a group of Kashmiri-looking men who discarded the packing at the shop itself and took away the cookers in polythene bags. The police got some leads from the Auranagabad arms haul as well. On May 9, 2006, the Anti-terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra police chased and caught a jeep near Ellora and seized 30 kg RDX, 10 AK-47 rifles and 2,000 bullets. During the interrogation of the arrested, the police realised that they were desperately trying to contact someone called Feroz Deshmukh in Mumbai. This man turned out of be the librarian of the well-known Islamic Research Foundation at Dongri in Mumbai. Deshmukh (27), a tall, slim man, had not police record and his interrogation after the blasts led to eyebrows being raised. Deshmukh was made to chat on the internet the absconding accused in the Aurangabad arms case and obtain a contact number, which turned out to be from Bangladesh. Monitoring this number showed that there were frequent calls made to Mumbai. It was based on this information that Abdul Majid, a resident of Raja Bazar, Kolkata was arrested for being a pointman of the LeT. According to the police, Deshmukh was the only link between the Aurangabad and Mumbai modules of the LeT. However, the telephone call analysis was of limited help to the investigators as the terrorists rarely spoke on their cell phones. Most cell phone firms do not keep records of missed calls. "They gave each other a missed call, which was signal to use a pre-determined public phone," said Roy. Another simple step the police, the crime branch in particular, took was the detention and interrogation of all former SIMI activists. Sifting through the list, the police zeroed in on Ehtesham Siddiqui, general secretary of SIMI's Maharashtra unit. "He sang like a canary and told us everything except his own role," said Roy. Eventually, his own role was established through the statements of other accused. Narco-analysis helped where sustained probe failed. The accused revealed during the narco-analysis that they knew how to make IEDs. They also revealed the names of some of their associates. Linking all the information put the 7/11 jigsaw together.