Kolkata, July 31 (IANS) West Bengal Police on Friday morning informed that the sleuths of the Special Task Force (STF) of the state police have arrested a youth on suspicion of being a militant. The arrest was made from a highly populated area of Burdwan city in East Burdwan district.
According to STF insiders, the young man named Hamid Mandal, a resident of Kashmir, is allegedly associated with the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
However, the police are investigating whether he was using a fake name or not. After the arrest, he will be produced before a district court in Burdwan town later in the day and the Public Prosecutor will seek his police custody.
The suspected JeM activist was arrested from an elite housing society ‘Renaissance Complex’ in Burdwan near the Durgapur Expressway. He was residing there after renting a flat within that housing complex.
After initial investigation, the STF sleuths have come to know that before settling at Burdwan, Hamid Mandal used to stay at a similar rented accommodation at Newtown on the northern outskirts of Kolkata.
What has worried the state police is the fact that the rented accommodation at New Town where Hamid Mandal used to reside earlier, was not very far from the house of Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, said a source aware of the development.
It is further learnt that from Hamid Mandal’s possession, the STF sleuths have secured some documents about the daily schedule of the Chief Minister. Besides Adhikari, the travel details of some other VVIPs have also been secured from his possession.
The investigating officers have also got information that an ISI-trained terrorist, Hamid, had spent considerable time in Pakistan.
For a significant period of time, he acted as a JeM handler in West Bengal whose main task was to influence Muslim youths through systematic brainwashing to join terrorist outfits and subsequently send them to Pakistan for training.
Meanwhile, the investigating officers have also started interrogating the homeowners both in New Town and Burdwan who rented their flats to Hamid. They are probing the nature of the identity documents that Hamid furnished to the homeowners while taking their flats on rent.
To recall, Adhikari’s security arrangements were periodically reviewed by the Union Government and accordingly upgraded even when he was the Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly during the previous Trinamool Congress regime.
He was on the target of fundamentalist organisations, as per central Intelligence inputs.
–IANS
src/rad
