The three arrested youths — Zia-ur Rahman, Shakir Nissar and Mohammed Shakeel — in the custody of Delhi police’s special cell on Sunday. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, Sept. 21: Delhi police have “quoted” the suspects arrested last night as saying they were students of Jamia Millia Islamia and Sikkim Manipal University (SMU), but the investigators did not verify the claims with the varsities, the institutes said today.

The police have disclosed the names of the institutes despite making a mistake on Friday by claiming that the two youths killed in the encounter were Jamia students.

The claim on Friday drew an official rebuttal from Jamia but the police were back naming names today.

According to the police, two of the men arrested late last night said they were studying at Jamia, while a third arrested suspect claimed he had enrolled at SMU for a long-distance MBA course.

Mohammed Shakeel and Zia-ur Rahman are students of MA (final) economics and BA (third year), respectively, at Jamia, while Shakir Nissar is pursuing his MBA at SMU, the police quoted the suspects as saying.

“We haven’t had the time to contact the universities. Our priority is to catch the absconding bombers. We are not saying that the suspects are students of a particular university; the arrested have told us so and we are just relaying that information,” a Delhi police officer said.

Asked whether such claims should be made public without verifying their authenticity, the officer refused to reply.

Till late this evening, neither Jamia nor SMU had heard from the police.

“Especially after the incident on Friday when the initial claims proved to be wrong, one would have thought the police would be more careful. But yet again, we come to hear of names only through the television,” an indignant Mushirul Hasan, the vice-chancellor of Jamia, said.

“Quite honestly, it being a Sunday, we cannot verify yet whether we have stud- ents with the names we are seeing on television,” Hasan added.

SMU chief executive officer Anand Sudarshan said his “officials are studying the university database”.

“We have not yet found anything to confirm the claims we are seeing on television,” he said.

But Indrani Roy Chowdhury, who teaches MA (final) economics students two mandatory courses — all students have to take these — said she was “fairly confident” that she did not have any student named Shakeel in her class. “I am fairly confident there is no Shakeel who attends any of my classes,” she said.

That does not necessarily mean Shakeel had not enrolled for the course, but it does indicate he may not have been a regular student.

It may also mean, Chowdhury explained, that Shakeel might have enrolled for the course — and obtained a genuine identity card — and then dropped out.

The police had earlier claimed that two alleged terrorists killed in an encounter on Friday were Jamia students — only to admit later that their claims were based on identity cards found on the men which later turned out to be fake.

The SMU distance education programme is accessed by 1,50,000 students, Sudarshan said.

“Till the police contact us, we do not even know if the information put out by the media is correct. Shakir Nissar is a reasonably common name when you have a lakh and a half students. Till the police give us more details, we can honestly only count the number of Nissars and Shakirs in our database,” he said.

“It is also a question of privacy of all the students with similar names at our institute. They should not be wrongly targeted,” Sudarshan said.