Mumbai, July 09: Ramchandra Kalsangra, alias Ramji, a key suspect in the bomb blasts in Hyderabad, Ajmer and Malegaon, apparently cast his vote in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in his home town of Shajapur near Indore in Madhya Pradesh even though he was on the run from investigators for months.
Kalsangra, who is suspected to be one of the main bomb-makers and planters in all three blasts that investigators now believe is the work of Hindu extremists, had been missing since the September 2008 Malegaon blast was cracked and blamed on members of a shadowy group called Abhinav Bharat.
Sources in the Maharashtra Police had then claimed that police in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh were not co-operating in pursuing the suspects. Central investigating agencies now say that this claim has been buttressed by their finding that Kalsangra voted in Shajapur in April 2009.
The information about his voting had been verified and confirmed, they claimed, adding that Kalsangra’s photograph in his voter ID card, released earlier this month along with the Rs 10 lakh reward announced by the CBI for information about him, matched the one used in his bank account.
Kalsangra is considered key to unraveling the links between the 2007 Mecca Masjid blast, the Ajmer blast the same year and the Malegaon blast a year later. He is suspected to have worked with RSS members Devendra Gupta and Sunil Joshi, among others, to make the bombs, procure some of the mobile phones used to trigger those bombs and also plant them.
While Gupta has been arrested by Rajasthan Police in connection with the Ajmer blast, Joshi was shot dead by motorcycle-borne men two months after the Ajmer blast while he was out for an evening walk in Dewas in Madhya Pradesh.
Investigators said that the group had together bought six mobile phones and two each were used in Hyderabad and Ajmer. However, only one of the two bombs exploded in both places, leaving the other as a vital clue and leading investigators to Kalsangra and his friends.
The probe into the phones found that the group had bought them from Jharkhand and West Bengal and Kalsangra had personally picked up two of them from Jamtara and Mihijam in Jharkhand.
Investigators also claimed that they had found a piece of paper with some code words written in Hindi in the container of the unexploded Ajmer bomb and suspect that the bomb-makers had accidentally left it inside. Shivnarayan Kalsangra, Ramji’s brother who is in the custody of Maharashtra police for the Malegaon blast, is alleged to have recognised the handwriting as that of Ramji’s, the sources said.
The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chargesheet in the Malegaon blast case alleges that Ramji made the bomb under directions from Lt. Col. Prasad Purohit and was moving between Nashik and Pune during those days. He is also accused of helping procure the motorbike which was used to plant the bomb.
-Agencies