Security agencies digging deep into the Burdwan terror matrix see links between the Thursday’s accidental blasts, the Metiabruz explosion of April 2012 and a TMC leader’s suspicious background.
As in Khagdagarh locality blast in Burdwan district, the West Bengal Police are alleged to have tried to hush up the Metiabruz case since it never probed the terror angle, said senior officials.
The agencies are probing all angles, including the one that points fingers at a senior TMC leader who had come under the scanner of Bangladesh security agencies for funding terrorism on their soil. The leads in the case point towards the neighbouring country.
Khagdagarh is strategically located with Bangladesh border hardly about 50 km away and not far from two neighbouring states of Jharkhand and Bihar. Security officials said the Bangladesh government has shared some documents on the TMC leader who has a terror past, as he once headed Simi’s West Bengal unit.
On April 9, 2012, two persons had succumbed to injuries they suffered during an explosion at a house in Masjidtala which comes under the jurisdiction of Metiabruz police station of Kolkotta.
The police dubbed it a crude bomb blast on the ground floor of a three-storied building but reports had said the impact was such that a portion of the structure was damaged. The case remains open, believe security agency officials, owing to lack of a thorough probe.
Officials said similar attempts were made by Burdwan police to destroy crucial evidence at the site of Thursday’s blast. They did not give access to central intelligence, investigating and forensic agencies that had landed after being tipped off about the incident.
The security and intelligence agencies are worried over the dimension of the Khagdagarh blast that exposed arms manufacturing factory-cum-training centre, which suspected Bangladeshi ultra Shakil Ahmad was running before being killed in the explosion.
One of the two absconders, Qaiser, is suspected to be a Bangladeshi national and repository of the large terror network across the border.
Initial inputs suggest that Ahmad is believed to have trained about 100 muslim youths to wage jihad through indoctrination from highly provocative material available on the internet and equipped them to handle arms, including grenades, rocket launchers and bombs.
The agencies are trying to find out the footprints of a consignment of arms the module had surreptitiously dispatched to Assam that witnesses clashes between ethnic groups and immigrant Muslims from Bangladesh. The police have seized al-Qaeda magazine “Inspiration” that was sourced to make sophisticated bombs and grenades.
