By IANS
Ranchi : Links to the recent bomb blasts at the shrine of Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer and the Mecca Msjid in Hyderabad have been traced to Jharkhand, Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials said Thursday.
Three people were killed and 16 injured when a bomb exploded during Ramadan prayers Oct 11 inside the shrine in Ajmer while nine people were killed during Friday prayers at the 17th century Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad May 18.
Police have said that mobile telephones with SIM cards were used to trigger both the blasts and the seller of the SIM cards has been traced to Mihijam town in Jamtara district of Jaharkhand.
Officials of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) visited Jamtara district to question the SIM card seller.
“The central intelligence team was in Jamtara and they interrogated Sahid, the owner of Sargam Telecom. Sahid had sold the SIM card used in the Ajmer blast to someone called Babulal Yadav without asking for valid documents,” a police official told IANS.
The name and address given by the man who bought the SIM card were false.
“Sahid was also interrogated with regards to the blast at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad,” the official said.
The West Bengal Police had also questioned Sahid in June about his role in the Hyderabad blast.
Such terror links have been found earlier in Jharkhand. In 2002, a central police team gunned down two terrorists in Hazaribagh district. They had been hiding in Hazaribagh after having carried out an attack on the American Centre in Kolkata.
In 1999, the Dhanbad Transport Office had issued a driving licence to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief P. Prabhakaran when Jharkhand was part of Bihar.
Intelligence officials say more than a dozen people having connections with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are living in the state.