Mumbai, May 03: The true extent of the Hindutva terror network, whose trail was being followed by slain Maharashtra top cop Hemant Karkare, is getting unravelled only now.
The then ATS chief, Karkare, while investigating the 2008 Malegaon blasts case, had reportedly developed certain leads on the involvement of Hindutva organisations in the attacks across the country. Had these inputs been followed in other blast cases, including those of Ajmer dargah and Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid, much breakthrough could have been achieved, sources say.
The probe team led by Karkare, who was killed in the 26/ 11 terror attack in Mumbai, knew that members from radical Hindutva organisations were planning to carry out bomb blasts in Muslim- dominated areas in retaliation against Islamist terror attacks.
So when the ATS suspected the involvement of Pragya Singh Thakur, Col Prasad Purohit and Dayanand Pandey in some cases, they began to monitor their phones. What came out of the tapes should have made all the investigating agencies in the country sit up.
In many tapes that were submitted to the MCOCA court as evidence, Purohit was heard bragging about having helped carry out two blasts earlier. While the ATS officials in Mumbai are not willing to divulge about the two blasts , sources said one could be the Ajmer blast and other might be either the Samjhauta Express blasts or the Mecca Masjid one.
Witnesses have also claimed that Purohit was heard saying that he had stolen around 5 kg of RDX from the army’s depot, which according to him, was used in the Samjhauta blasts.
While many believed that the Malegaon blasts were an aberration, those who were privy to the investigations said the attempt by radicals in the Hindutva groups was not an isolated one.
A police officer said: “ We have Dayanand Pandey’s confession where he said that in a meeting held in Deolali in August 2007, Malegaon blast accused Sudhakar Chaturvedi, Purohit and Major ( retired) Ramesh Upadhayay were planning an attack on the day of Urs in Panipat. Here too, Purohit promised to arrange for the explosives while Chaturvedi said he would arrange for the men who would plant the bombs.” Sources said Karkare, on his part, had uncovered a nexus that clearly showed that a huge group of Hindutva radicals — practically from every state in the country — was involved in the terror plots.
While Purohit is suspected to have been connected to the Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid blasts, the absconding Hindutva terror suspect from Gujarat’s Dang, Aseemanand, is also learnt to be connected to the Malegaon and Gujarat’s Modassa blasts in 2008. Investigators have also hinted at the possibility of the men who triggered the bombs in Ajmer, Mecca Masjid and Malegaon being part of the same group involved in the Nanded blast in 2006. In Nanded, the blast took place in the house of a retired PWD engineer whose son and two other men were killed while making a bomb.
Later, former navy captain Sanatkumar Bhate told the Nanded police and the ATS that RSS elements were planning to attack members of the minority community from 2000 onwards. In fact, one Himanshu Phanse who was killed in the Nanded blast was known to be close to VHP leaders, according to the statements of the witnesses and accused in the case.
ATS officials said when Karkare was conducting investigations, all these facts were passed on to central intelligence agencies. And it’s because of the failure to follow these leads that the Ajmer Sharif blast case took so long to crack. Sources said that besides the Modassa blast, even the lone blast at Mehrauli in Delhi in 2008 after the serial blasts was said to be the handiwork of radical Hindutva activists.
–Agencies