Delhi blast: Clues lead to Bangladesh

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday asked home minister P. Chidambaram and law minister Salman Khurshid to call on Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia and take 'urgent steps' to strengthen security arrangements at the Supreme Court.

Wednesday’s attack was followed by four terror emails, one purportedly from the Bangladesh-based
HuJI warning of more attacks at high courts and the Supreme Court.

Chidambaram earlier on Friday said there were 'promising' but not 'very conclusive leads' in the case and that foreign agencies have been roped in. The fourth email surfaced Friday from Indian Mujahideen’s 'Chotoo' warning of a major terror attack in Ahmedabad.

The Delhi police had received the third email, apparently from the IM, Thursday evening. The sender had identified himself as Ali Saed El-Hoorie and sent the mail from the ID kill.India@yahoo.com [1]. “This is to inform you that the India Mujahideen claims the terror attack on Delhi High Court. I just want you to pass a message to the Indian Government that next blast will be so cruel that you people won’t be able to forget it for decade (sic),” the email read.

The server of this email was reportedly traced to Moscow even though investigating agencies have sought help from Yahoo!.

Friday’s email, while warning of an attack in Ahmedabad, read: “IM has planned the attack carefully. It is impossible for the Delhi police and NIA to trace the origin of the mails.” It cautioned: “In Ahmedabad will target a crowded place and the police will find it difficult to crack it.”

In what is viewed as a positive lead, investigators are probing two calls made on the evening of the blast from two different places in Uttar Pradesh to Bangladesh. Highly placed sources said they have
managed to track calls made from Pilkhuwa and Azamgarh in UP to Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong in
Bangladesh.

Both these calls were made from a PCO between 5 pm and 6 pm on the day of the blast. Both Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar have Harkatul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) training camps and it is in these camps that some key IM members are said to have taken refuge. The intelligence agencies are
now trying to ascertain the number of incoming and outgoing calls made from two Bangladesh
numbers.

The IB has constituted three different teams to assist the National Investigation Agency. One team is working exclusively on this particular angle with assistance from the UP ATS.