A city court on Saturday 20th September 2008 sent two suspected terrorists allegedly involved in the Delhi serial bombings to police custody for 14 days.

The court sent Mohammed Saif, who was arrested in Friday’s shootout at Jamia Nagar, and Zeeshan Ahmed, who was arrested from Jhandewalan late Friday, to 14 days’ police custody.

Claiming a major breakthrough in last week’s serial blasts in the national capital, Delhi Police said two of those arrested after Friday’s encounter have confessed to their involvement in the terror act having planted explosives in two places.

Acting on a tip off, police on Friday night arrested Zeeshan from the premises of a news channel where he had gone to give an interview. With his arrest, police had caught two militants allegedly involved in the blasts.

Investigators are on the lookout for at least ten people who planted bombs following the “disclosure” by Mohd Saif, who was arrested after a fierce encounter in south Delhi in which two other suspected militants were killed, a senior police official said.

The official claimed that Saif had confessed to his role in the Delhi serial blasts which claimed over 20 lives and that he planted a bomb near Regal Cinema in Connaught Place. The bomb was defused after it was spotted by a ragpicker who alerted police.

The official claimed that a group of two men each went to plant the bombs in the city.

Saif also told investigators that Atif, who was among the two who was killed in the daring encounter in Jamia Nagar yesterday, was the mastermind of the blasts and that he was a prominent member of the Indian Mujahideen, the official said.

Atif himself planted the bomb in Greater Kailash market in south Delhi, Saif is believed to have told sleuths of Delhi Police’s Special Cell who are interrogating him.

The ten men, for whom the police are conducting searches in various places including Jamia Nagar in south Delhi, are believed to have been brought to Delhi by Atif on July 27.

Atif, who is believed to have links with Tauqeer, the mastermind behind the serial blasts in various parts of the country in the recent past, had travelled to Ahmedabad on July 24, two days before the serial blasts in that city, Delhi Police Commissioner Y S Dadwal said.

Meanwhile, the mother of the blasts mastermind Abu Subhan Qureshi wants her son to stand trial. “I want him to come back and stand trial,” she told a packed press conference at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh. “He should clarify the allegations of terror levelled against him.”

She said she had only twice removed her hijab. “If he is found guilty, I would appeal that he be hanged in front of me. So that nobody else dares do such an act again,” she said.

Although the family did not know where Qureshi was after the train bombings, they did not lodge a missing complaint. “We do not even know whether he is dead or alive now,” said the family’s lawyer, Mobin Solkar. “On interrogation after the train bombings, the family did not want to trace him.”

Having obtained a diploma in industrial electronics from Bharatiya Vidyapeeth in 1995, Qureshi did a series of part- and full-time jobs in software firms. The police said Qureshi worked as editor and publisher of a Delhi-based magazine, Islamic Movement.

Related posts:

1. Blasts materminds arrested
2. Mumbai techie ‘behind’ Delhi blasts
3. A week’s wait to meet schoolmate Manmohan Singh