The 11 terror suspects held by the Bangalore CCB Police on Wednesday morning - five in Hubli and six in the city - were produced before the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Court at his residence here on Thursday night.
The magistrate remanded them in police custody for 14 days for further investigations.
The police on Thursday claimed that the arrested persons had links with proscribed terror outfits across the border – LeT and HuJI — and were plotting to assassinate prominent leaders, including some MPs and legislators, besides prominent journalists known for their views against minorities.
L R Pachau, the state Director General & Inspector General of Police (in-charge) had claimed that a catastrophe was averted by the arrests.
Sources told Deccan Herald that the CCB sleuths were subjecting the suspects to sustained interrogation at an undisclosed location. They said the questioning was about their links, associates, activities and the alleged terror plot.
The police have also seized a hard disk along with certain Urdu literature from the house at JC Nagar. A police team is analysing the contents of this hard disk and determining the contents of the seized Urdu literature. Police sources said the terror modules busted have a regional flavour with its epicentre in Hubli. Police believe that one of the men arrested in Hubli was a religious scholar and also a hardcore fundamentalist around whom the modules might have been formed.
Most of the 11 arrested had a Hubli link. The sources also said the targets of the modules also had a Hubli link and were known to be holding right-wing sympathies. They also claimed that they were about to execute one of their targets, a columnist of a Kannada daily allegedly harbouring an anti-minority bias. The police, who were tracking the modules for the past couple of months, had caught wind of the plot and busted the module.
Based on the information given out by those arrested during the interrogation, the police are likely to pick a few more persons. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the police have picked up a man in Andhra Pradesh and a few others in Shimoga and Mangalore on Friday. However, the police declined to confirm the news.
A senior officer dismissed rumours that the two terror modules busted were plotting to target the MG Road Metro station. “They never intended to explode the metro station as their targets were different. Neither they prepared bombs, nor they exported them. Moreover, they lack the expertise in making and exploding bombs. These people are a different stuff,” the officer told Deccan Herald.
“They are intelligent and hard to crack. They are not revealing anything vital at this stage and the police are confident of extracting information from them. They are not innocent as is being claimed. They are radicals and were driven by extremist ideologies. Each of them were cautious about their moves and never exhibited either in their expression or body language”, he added.