First arrest made in July 13 Mumbai blasts

Nepalese police have detained an Indian man in connection with the triple bomb blasts in Mumbai on July 13 that killed 24 people, media reports said and a police source told AFP on Tuesday.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the man as a 43-year-old from the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Anti-terrorist police raided his apartment in Kathmandu on Saturday, he said.

"He was arrested on suspicion of his links with the Mumbai blasts," he added, explaining that police were probing text messages and phone calls to someone in the Indian city.

It would be the first arrest anywhere in connection with the Mumbai explosions, the first attack on the city since the traumatic November 2008 assault by Islamist militants that left 166 dead and more than 300 injured.

Nepal police spokesman Nawaraj Dhakal confirmed an Indian man had been detained but denied it was related to the Mumbai blasts.

The police source, who said he took part in the operation to arrest the suspect, stood by his account and suggested senior officers wanted to downplay the detention while an investigation was underway.

The state-run Nepalese newspaper Gorkhapatra and Indian television channel CNN-IBN also reported Tuesday that an Indian man had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the Mumbai blasts.

No one was immediately available for comment at Mumbai police when contacted by AFP.

The development, if confirmed, would provide valuable clues to police in India's commercial capital who have struggled with the case despite the deployment of forensic teams and top detectives.

Anti-terrorism squad officers fear that monsoon rains which lashed Mumbai on the night of the attacks and for days afterwards may have hindered the search for vital clues.

Police have said the three rush-hour bombs, targeting gold, jewellery and diamond trading hubs plus a residential area, contained ammonium nitrate and were set off by timer devices.

Teams of intelligence officers have fanned out nationwide to interview members of the Indian Mujahideen, a home-grown Islamist militant group suspected of being behind the explosions.

Two suspected members arrested in Mumbai earlier this month in connection with bombings in the western city of Ahmedabad in 2008 have been questioned, police have said, as have people with known links to the criminal underworld.

The Indian Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad attacks and a series of blasts across the country that year, including in the capital New Delhi.

Nepal and India share a 1,751-kilometre-long (1088-mile) porous and open border, which wanted suspects have often used to flee from India.

Probe focuses on local group

The prime suspect in the deadly bomb attack in Mumbai — the Indian Mujahedeen — has re-emerged three years after authorities believed they virtually wiped out the terror group in a crackdown that left many of its leaders dead, in jail or hiding abroad.

The return of the shadowy extremist network, which Indian officials have linked to Pakistani extremists, could herald a new wave of terror attacks across the country after three years of relative calm and threaten the recently renewed peace process with Islamabad.

The July 13 rush hour attacks in three busy Mumbai neighborhoods killed 20 people and rekindled memories of 2008, when deadly explosions across the country struck fear in Indians.

Police said the Mumbai bombs, fabricated from ammonium nitrate, were similar to those used by the Indian Mujahedeen in the past, leading police to focus on the group.

"It is one of the most likely targets for us," said Deven Bharti, a senior Mumbai police official.
The coordinated bombings followed three smaller attacks in the past 10 months, two of which the group claimed responsibility.

The Indian Mujahedeen was not destroyed, said Ajit Doval, the former head of India's Intelligence Bureau. "It was reorganizing itself," he said.

Though similar to earlier bombings, the Mumbai attacks were not accompanied by an email claiming responsibility, which had been a hallmark of Indian Mujahedeen attacks, Bharti said.

A Western diplomat following the case said the lack of a claim of responsibility was surprising, but most people were working under the assumption the group was responsible.

Nevertheless, investigators have been cautious about attributing blame for the new attacks to a group accused of ties to Pakistan, especially with fragile peace talks between the two countries' foreign ministers under way this week.

Until arrests are made, "I cannot say with 100 percent comfort level that this is IM," Bharti said.
The Indian Mujahedeen, which sprang out of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India, is "a radical fringe of technically-savvy disaffected Indian Muslims who embrace Islamic extremism in response to perceived injustices by the Hindu majority," according to a 2008 diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi obtained by WikiLeaks.

The youth were galvanized by Hindu extremists' 1992 destruction of the 16th century Babri Mosque — and the bloody riots that followed — as well as a 2002 spasm of communal violence in the western state of Gujarat that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim.

Militants in rival Pakistan took advantage of this anger, recruiting Indian Muslims they met on trips to Saudi Arabia and giving them weapons and bomb-making training in camps run by the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba group in Pakistan, said a former Indian intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

The recruits were then sent back home to India to wreak havoc, the official said. While their specific attacks were not organized by Lashkar, they did receive funding from the extremist group through the unregulated hawala Islamic banking network, the recently retired official said.

Because of the clear operational links to groups in Pakistan, the Indian Mujahideen is not really seen as an indigenous terror group, said the Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss intelligence matters.

Pakistani officials were not available for comment, and Pakistani militants denied any connection with the group.

"We do not have any links with the Indian Mujahideen and had never had even historic links with them," said Yahya Mujahed, spokesman for Janaat-ud-Dawaa, the new name given to Lashkar-e-Taiba after it was banned in Pakistan several years ago.

In his book, "Indian Mujahedeen: The Enemy Within," journalist Shishir Gupta describes how two brothers, the top Indian Mujahedeen leaders Riyaz and Iqbal Bhatkal, ran terror training camps on the beaches of the southern Indian state of Karnataka with the help of militants trained in Pakistan in preparation for a series of strikes.

At 1 p.m. on Nov. 23, 2007, the previously unknown group sent an email to TV news channels declaring it was about to attack courts in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Five minutes later, blasts shook courthouses in the cities of Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad, killing 16.

Another coordinated bomb attack claimed by the group hit the crowded markets and streets outside Hindu temples in the city of Jaipur on May 13, 2008, killing 80.

Two months later, the Indian Mujahedeen sent an email daring police to stop a planned attack in Ahmedabad. Five minutes later the first of 16 bombs exploded in the city in a strike that killed 45. Two months after that, there was another email followed by another series of blasts, this time in New Delhi, where 21 were killed.

Six days later, police in the capital raided an Indian Mujahedeen hideout, leading to a series of arrests across the country that nearly destroyed the group, Gupta said.

Some members were killed in shootouts. Others fled.

Last year, India gave Pakistan a dossier containing the names of Indian extremists — including the Bhatkal brothers and other group leaders — believed to be hiding out in Pakistan. Pakistan dismissed it as "literature."

Aside from the February 2010 bombing of a cafe in the city of Pune that has been linked to the group, the threat from the Indian Mujahedeen appeared to have dissipated.

But smaller attacks in recent months led to fears the group might be reforming.

Last Sept. 19, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and wounded two Taiwanese men outside a famous New Delhi mosque. A few minutes later, a bomb rigged to a nearby car malfunctioned and caught fire. An email from the Indian Mujahedeen claimed responsibility. On Dec. 7, another bomb exploded on the banks of the Ganges River in the city of Varanasi, killing a 2-year-old. The group claimed responsibility for that as well. On May 25, a small explosion that appeared to be a failed car bomb hit the parking lot of the High Court in New Delhi.
Then came the deadlier Mumbai bombings.

Over the weekend, a man was arrested in Nepal on suspicion of having links to the Mumbai blasts, according to Nepal's government-run Gorkhapatra newspaper. But authorities there would not comment Tuesday and the significance was not known. Indian Mujahideen members have been accused in the past of hiding across the relatively porous borders with Nepal and Bangladesh.

Doval, the former intelligence chief, said the group has little support among India's Muslim community and is making no political demands of the government.

"It's just mayhem without a defined cause," he said.

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