Ranchi, April 19: A suspect in the Burdwan blast case in Bengal has been arrested from Jharkhand while he was on an alleged recruitment drive in a remote Santhal Pargana district.
Pakur police identified the suspect held last evening as Ibrahim Sheikh alias Lal Mohammad, 30.
Police said Ibrahim was an operative of Jamat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) that came into prominence in India when a bomb went off accidentally in a Burdwan home on October 2, last year. The case is now being probed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
Arrested yesterday evening from Tilbhitta railway station, 5km from district headquarters, when he alighted from a local train, Ibrahim had with him a country-made revolver, six live cartridges, four country-made low-intensity bombs and a memory chip containing extremist footage and literature.
Police said he was going to Pakur from Murshidabad via Farakka.
Pakur police, led by SP Anup Birthare, interrogated him overnight. A Bengal police team reached Pakur this morning. Top sources said NIA teams from Patna and Calcutta were also expected to reach Pakur in the next couple of days.
Ibrahim came on NIA scanner after Bengal police on November 8 last year arrested Rahmatulla alias Sajid, a Bangladeshi national and supposedly a key man in the Burdwan blast that killed two persons and injured a third.
During his interrogation, Sajid had said Ibrahim, a resident of Bengal's Murshidabad district, was a JMB member entrusted with recruiting youths from Bengal and Jharkhand's Santhal Pargana.
Police said Ibrahim, an eloquent speaker and an expert in making low-intensity bombs, confessed during his interrogation that he and other JMB members were trying to regroup themselves and he was on a recruitment drive in Pakur.
He had confessed that the bombs recovered from him were meant for demonstrations.
"At this moment, I can say Ibrahim has recruited many youths in Pakur. We have recovered a memory chip with audio-visual messages, hate speeches, PDF files and literature. He is a close associate of Sajid," the Pakur SP, who supervised yesterday's entire operation, told The Telegraph.
Ibrahim, who joined the JMB in 2012, was also operational in-charge of Fatimatul Johra madarsa at Mukimnagar in Murshidabad set up by the terror outfit. According to the NIA, the madarsa was an operational base of JMB and used to recruit and train youths.
"After the madarsa was sealed, Ibrahim sneaked to Pakur, thinking it to be a safe hideout. We need to find out who gave him logistics support and accommodation," ADG (operations) S.N. Pradhan of Jharkhand police said.
After Pakur, the neighbouring Sahebganj was Ibrahim's destination.
"For a terrorist outfit like JMB, nothing can be better than Pakur and Sahebganj because of porous borders and a drastically changed demography with influx of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants," a senior IB official posted in Pakur said.
This January, the NIA, in a joint operation with Sahebganj police, arrested Rezaul Karim (30), a JMB operative from Karnpurato locality in Taljhari. Karim had been working as a labourer at a double railway track-laying site between Sahebganj and Teen Pahar.
