The HuJI linkman, Aftab Alam Ansari,28, an employee of Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC) who ferried smuggled RDX and helped carry out the deadly blasts in the courts of Lucknow and Varanasi a couple of months back, reportedly confessed that New Delhi and Mumbai figured in the next list of HuJI targets, sources said here on Tuesday. Following his admission, sleuths from the city police and their counterparts in Delhi and Mumbai have mounted a massive hunt to nab his accomplices who have gone into hiding following their key linkman’s arrest.

Aftab alias Raju who had made several trips to Bangladesh, courtesy the porous Indo-Bangladesh border in Bengal before and after he joined his service, had been trained in Pakistan in the art of handling and smuggling RDX.

What has been worrying the sleuths was the widespread network that the banned HuJI outfit has been able to establish here owing to the city’s proximity to the Bangladesh border.

“We strongly believe Aftab alone would not dare to undertake the entire operation of smuggling; he must have some fellow-carriers or sympathisers to provide him a shadow protection,” sources told the DHNS. Aftab, investigators learnt, used to take leaves from his office to receive RDX consignments across the border and then trekked to certain hideouts to change identities, before undertaking travels to Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and New Delhi.

“Even after his wedding at Gorakjpur in UP, he carried explosives along with his nuptial material and handed over the consignment to a HuJI ultra, Md Tariq,” sources said.

Aftab had close links with Ulfa and other Northeast and Nepal militants. While Aftab’s relatives are tight lipped following his arrest, police have been keeping a tab on the whereabouts of some of them in Uttar Pradesh and Kolkata. His main mentor, Jalaluddin alias Babubhai, who detonated the blast in the Samjhota Express last year, picked him up while he was in Gorakhpur.

“We’re also probing [into] how he secured the job of a head majdoor in CESC in 2004, following his father’s retirement in the same company.

Aftab’s formal indoctrination into the terrorist outfit took place around the same time,” sources said.