No Gujarati Muslim is part of Revenge Force - police

Mumbai's senior police officials made it clear yestyerday that Gujarati Muslims had no links with the self styled Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force that claims it is behind the Mumbai bomb blasts on August 25.

"This is a group floated in this city and has no link with Gujarat", said Dr Satyapal Singh, Joint Commissioner of Police, Crime, Mumbai Police as crime fighters in the southern city of Bangalore announced the arrest of a man who spent years abroad and may have links with suspects in theMumbai twin blasts.

The man, identified on his Indian passport as Mohammad Fahim but whose real name is believed to be Mohammad Usman, was arrested overnight when he tried to board a flight from the southern Indian city of Bangalore, police said.

"We are looking into all the possibilities," senior police official C. Chandrashekhar said. "One cannot rule out anything."

He said the 30-year-old had stayed abroad between December 2000 and June 2002 and between July 2002 and August 2003.

Bangalore police said they had asked their Mumbai counterparts to verify any "complicity" between the suspect and the car bombings that killed 52 people.

"So far during interrogation he has not disclosed anything. But despite being a resident of (the southern Indian city) Hyderabad he only used to visit Mumbai from abroad," Chandrashekhar said.

"The cases registered against him now are for obtaining a passport under a ficticious name, impersonation as his real name is Mohammad Usman and cheating under the Indian Penal Code.

"He is also charged with suppressing material facts fradulently," he said.

Four Muslims including a man and wife and their 17-year-old daughter were charged Monday in the bombings under tough anti-terror laws that may carry a death sentence.

Mumbai police commissioner R.S. Sharma said that police suspected the militants belonged to a splinter group of Lashkar-e-Taiba called the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Group -- named after the anti-Muslim riots last year in the western Indian state that killed 2,000 people.

International link
Police have been forced to consider an international link to the Mumbai attack after confirming the explosive used in the blasts at the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar on August 25 that left 52 dead, indicatewas RDX, deployed in terrorist attacks around the world including the October 2002 blast at a nightclub on the Indonesian resort island of Bali that killed 202 people.

But investigations are equally clear that no Muslim from Gujarat is involved in the Force that carried out the explosions.

"Forming the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Group was just a cover to carry out and justify these blasts, " Singh told reporters.

Moreover, the post-Godhra violence could have been an easier reason to indoctrinate such people to carry out these acts, he added.

Four people have been arrested in connection with the recent blasts as well as the bomb that went off in a bus in Ghatkopar on July 28.

One of the accused Arshad Ansari was born and brought up in Mumbai whilst the other man who was arrested Sayed Mohammed Hanif and his family, originally came from Uttar Pradesh, but have lived in this city all along.

The modus operandi of the masterminds of these terrorist acts was to carry out the blasts by creating various modules within which the members worked. Mumbai Police has already cracked down on the three earlier modules- Padgha-Borivili, Aurangabad and Mumbai-Kurla, with the latest blast being done by the fourth module.

A coordinator or the person who masterminded these acts knew what each module was doing "though there was no inter-module connection," Singh said.

"Each module was not aware of what the other was doing."

An overseas-based group was controlling and using these people, he added.

Singh says that after the August 25 blasts, there was a communication by e-mail and telephone by the four arrested people who reported back that the blasts had been accomplished.

"Money was no problem for them. The driving force was their ideolgoical belief."

Singh pointed to the Mira-Bhayander township outside Mumbai as now becoming the hub of terrorists with Jaish-e-Mohammed connections.

Singh said that reports of the origin of the bombs from either Bangladesh or Nepal are all speculative.

However, a senior police officer in Kolkata said yesterday that the deadly explosives used in the twin bombings in India's financial capital were smuggled in from Bangladesh.

Ranjit Mohanty, additional director-general of police in West Bengal state, said authorities were investigating who was involved in the smuggling operation.

West Bengal, in India's east, shares a porous 2,000-kilometer-long (1,250- mile-long) border with Bangladesh.

India has claimed in the past that separatist guerrillas and Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, used Bangladesh territory for attacks in India, a charge the Bangladesh government denies.

Bangladesh has rejected Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes' claim that Al Qaida had set up bases in Bangladesh.

Last year, India handed Dhaka a list of 99 alleged terrorist camps in Bangladesh. But Bangla-desh, once part of Pakistan, said no such camps existed on its territory.

Militants in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, where separatists are fighting Indian forces, commonly use RDX in their explosives, Indian security officials say.

RDX was last known to have been used in Bombay in March 1993 serial bombings that killed more than 250 people.

- With inputs from agencies