Wahed was distraught on hearing that Shahid alias Bilal, his son, who is the most wanted terrorist suspect of Hyderabad blasts was shot dead in Karachi. He broke down as the media thronged his house in the lower-middle class Moosarambagh locality and insisted on commenting about his son’s death. But he claims to know as much as the media.

Top police officials here, including the state police chief M A Basith and city police commissioner Balwinder Singh too have no information on whether the person that was killed on August 30 was indeed the suspected mastermind of half a dozen terror attacks in Hyderabad since 2005, the latest being the Mecca Masjid bomb explosion of May 18 and the twin bomb explosions of August 25.

“The police cannot confirm the killing of Bilal until we receive an official report from the Pakistan authorities. So far, the Karachi police has not got in touch with us over  the death of Bilal,” he said.

Shahid, fifth of the seven sons of a retired school teacher Wahed, was the commander of Harkat-ul-Jihadi Islami and was reportedly organising terrorist activities from Bangladesh for the past few years. After the twin blasts in Hyderabad, he was said to have fled to Dubai. However, it is believed by the ISI that recruited him, that he was gunned down in a street of Karachi along with a friend, while they were  on a motorbike.

Shahid, who had links with an Islamist extremist organisation in Hyderabad, Darsgah Jihad-o-Shadadat, came on the police radar in 2002 after he picked up a quarrel with organisers of a Ganesh pandal in his neighbourhood.
A college drop out, Shahid was picked up again soon after, for conspiring to kill a local BJP leader and was slapped with a case. Within a few weeks, he left home and has since not met his family, according to his father Wahed and mother Hafeeza Begum.

 According to the police, he was trained by the Lashkar-e-Toiba. He is supposed to be an adroit bombmaker and is said to have set up and trained sleeper cells in Hyderabad and Bidar in Karnataka, where he is believed to have lived for some time, after joining hands with terror organisations. While intelligence officials say that Shahid was seen in Dhaka and Karachi, his father Wahed insists that his son was in the custody of Hyderabad police.