Ahmedabad: The Gujarat police yesterday said they had busted a nationwide network of terrorists by arresting four people in two days allegedly having links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
The crime branch of police arrested three people, Ilyas Memon, Khalid Ansari and Sirajuddin Ansari, from Ahmedabad and Kari Muqadil, a cleric, from the city of Surat.
Khalid Ansari, arrested on Monday, is a younger brother of Aslam Ansari alias Imran Kashmiri, one of the main accused in the Mumbai train blasts of July 11 and was behind suspicious activities in Aurangabad from where the Maharashtra police had earlier this year recovered a huge cache of arms, police said.
The arrested people were the members of a nationwide network of the LeT and were running a sleeper cell, said Ahmedabad deputy commissioner of police (crime) Manoj Shashidhar.
Recruitment
"They were in constant contact with other terrorist cells in north India, Maharashtra and Hyderabad. Their main purpose was recruitment and they have recruited numerous youths from Maharashtra and Gujarat, sending many of them for training across the border," Shashidhar said.
Police said the two people arrested on Monday, Ilyas Memon and Khalid Ansari, revealed that there were 20 terrorists trained recently by LeT to spread terror across India.
The two people arrested yesterday were among the 20 trained in terror. Ten of them belonged to Gujarat and a search was on to nab the remaining.
They had been circulating CDs on the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002, police said, adding such material was seized from Muqadil in Surat.
Shashidhar said that the Gujarat police had been working in close coordination with their counterparts in other states to dismantle the terrorist network.
