Nov. 1: Officers of the NIA and the Central Forensic Science Laboratory and a metallurgy professor of IIT Kharagpur today visited a wok (kadhai) manufacturing factory near Burdwan’s Khagragarh where Abdul Hakim, who was injured in the October 2 blast, had been recruited a fortnight before the explosion.

The seven-member team collected samples of raw materials from the factory at Saraitikar village, 1km from the blast-hit bomb-making unit at Khagragarh.

Sources said chemicals rich in aluminium and lead had been seized from the Khagragarh flat after the “accidental” blast. Investigators suspect Hakim, who is in SSKM Hospital, stole the metals, whose alloys are used to make woks, from the factory.

“Samples of the raw materials, mostly alloys of several metals including aluminium and lead, that are used to manufacture kadhai have been collected. They would be matched with the sample of chemicals and explosives we took from the blast site,” an NIA officer said.

The NIA has learnt that Hakim had joined work at the factory on September 17.

“Hakim was introduced to the factory owner by one Asadullah Sheikh, who runs a wholesale aluminium business,” an investigator said today after questioning Zakir Mir, the owner of the wok-manufacturing unit.

Mir said later that he had employed Hakim “in good faith”. “He was paid Rs 100 a day and had been promised a two-fold hike if he worked sincerely,” Mir said.

He said the factory had to be closed down as most of the employees left work after the October 2 blast. “Police started coming to my factory several times after the blast. My employees got scared and left,” Mir said.

He said he had found “nothing suspicious” about Hakim at the time of hiring him.

“After the blast, I saw the picture of Shakil Ahmed (who died in the blast) on TV and recognised him. He had come to meet Hakim at my factory twice,” Mir said.

The NIA has sealed the account of a suspected Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) operative at a co-operative bank in Burdwan’s Mangalkot. “A big amount had been withdrawn from the account on September 27 (five days before the blast),” an officer said.

The NIA today questioned a madarsa clerk in Nadia in connection with the blast case.

The sources said Ghiasuddin Munshi’s name cropped up during the questioning of Gulshan Bibi, who was arrested from the blast site.