Top HuJI militant held in connection with UP serial blast

Kolkata/Lucknow, Dec 29 (UNI) Top HuJI militant Aftab Alam Ansari, suspected of being a third conspirator of the November 23 serial blasts which rocked three courts in Uttar Pradesh, was arrested in West Bengal last evening in a joint operation by the West Bengal CID and Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF).

Bengal CID DIG (Operations) Rajib Kumar, talking to UNI today, said, ''The UP STF had come to the city to arrest Ansari, who is wanted in several terror related cases. We have assisted the STF in the arrest.'' The militant was arrested from a house at Cossipur road of the Baranagar area in West Bengal's northern fringes.

A native of Malda in West Bengal, he is said to be the main conspirator behind the serial blasts which rocked the Varanasi district court premises apart from the serial bomb blasts in three civil courts of UP.

The three blasts at the Varanasi civil court premises killed nine people and left more than 40 others wounded.

Ansari will be produced before the Alipore police court today and taken to UP a day after.

The arrested was operating under a lot of aliases and was also known as Raju.

Sources said the STF team had already been sent to West Bengal to bring Ansari to UP on transit remand for further interrogation.

Earlier, Waliullah, the main accused in the Varanasi's Sankat Mochan blast of March 7, 2006, had also admitted during his interrogation that the accused had supplied him the explosives used in the 2006 Varanasi blast.

Last week, the STF arrested two terrorists-- Mohammad Tariq and Khalid Mujahid-- from Barabanki railway station who were the conspirators of the May 2007 Gorakhpur blast and the serial blasts of November 23 which rocked the civil court premises in Faizabad, Varanasi and Lucknow, killing 13 and injuring 70 others.

Police teams from Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra also interrogated the two HuJI terrorists arrested in UP last week in connection with the blasts which had torn through various districts of their states in the recent past.

UNI