Kathmandu, July 14: Two Pakistanis arrested from a five-star hotel in Kathmandu on Wednesday in connection with the Mumbai train blasts have been remanded in five days’ police custody, but mystery shrouds the whereabouts of two more picked up at the same time from a downtown hotel.

Kathmandu district court judge Mohan Raman Bhattarai issued the remand order for Ghulam Hussein Cheema of Lahore and Atta Moinuddin Siddiqui of Karachi, rejecting the police plea for a 25-day remand.

The two had reportedly fled Nepal after the police recovered 16 kg of RDX from their room in New Baneshwor, Kathmandu, on April 11, 2001.

The court orders came even as media reports claimed that a high-level CBI team had arrived from New Delhi to gather more information about the arrests. Indian embassy officials, however, denied that a CBI team was in Kathmandu.

Sources said the duo was arrested after investigating agencies tracked some calls to Mumbai from their hotel room. “The timing and frequency of the calls aroused suspicion,” a source said, adding that they had come to Kathmandu on July 8 on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from Karachi and were scheduled to return tomorrow.

In his testimony in court, Siddique claimed he was the manager of the Pokhara-Marsyangdi Road Construction Project and Cheema said he was an accountant in the same project. Both said they had nothing to do with the RDX that was recovered and insisted they had come to Nepal to settle some pending cash transactions.

The two were earlier employed by a Pakistani construction firm, Sachel Engineering Works Ltd, implicated in the RDX seizure case.

A Pakistan embassy staffer, Mohammad Arshad Cheema, was deported in the RDX case while Ghulam Hussain and Siddiqui managed to flee Nepal. Sources said the duo were being interrogated to ascertain if they had any links with the terrorist outfit, Lashkar-e-Toiba, a suspect in the Mumbai blasts.

Two residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Asif Ali alias Wasim Ali and Waled Mohammad alias Sajid Ali, were also held on Wednesday from another hotel. While some media reports said they were released this morning after the police found no evidence of their links with any terrorist group, others said they were being interrogated by a joint team of Indian and Nepali officials. The police denied both versions.