By TwoCircles.net staff reporter,
Mumbai: In a further development in the Nanded 2006 blasts case the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has recently secured the custody of the tainted army officer lieutenant Srikant Purohit and questioned him about his role in it. Purohit, an accused in the Malegaon September 2008 blasts, is the second person after Rakesh Dattatraya Dhawade, another accused in the case, whom CBI took into remand and questioned about Nanded blasts.
It was on the intervening night of April 4-5, 2006 that a bomb went off at the residence of Laxman Rajkondwar, an alleged Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker, while it was being assembled. Naresh, Rajkondwar’s son Naresh and Himanshu, alleged Vishwa Hindu Parishad activist, were killed in the blasts.
The investigating agencies reportedly recovered from the blast site skull caps, fake beards and other Islamic attires along with a plan according to which a mosque in Aurangabad, nearly 200 km from Nanded, was to be targeted.
As per the media reports Purohit whose remand was taken from a designated court was examined by the detectives of the Special Crime unit of CBI to verify whether he played any important role in providing training to the cadre of Abhinav Bharat.
The voluminous charge sheet Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) filed in September 2008 Malegaon blasts case named Purohit and Rakesh Dattatraya Dhawade among 14 others as accused. Dhawade had allegedly made arrangements and facilitated training to the accused persons in the Nanded 2006 bomb blasts.
During Malegaon 2008 investigations for the first time the face of Hindu extremists was unveiled and it had raised question on the nature of the CBI probe in the Nanded explosions which may have ignored the early signs of self-styled right wing groups getting armed.
However, with the decision of the present CBI director Ashwani Kumar the CBI reopened probe in Nanded blast case in December last year after the revelations of the Malegaon investigation.
The reports quoting the sources in the central security agencies read that one of the accused, whose voice had to be restored after operating upon his vocal chords damaged in the blast, had told the investigators that the Bajrang Dal activist Naresh had allegedly planned three blasts taking place outside the mosques in Jalna and Parbani in Maharashtra in 2003 and 2004 respectively.
Claiming that a very important call made from the mobile of Naresh was traced to a significant saffron outfit functionary in Ayodhya the central security agencies also asked CBI why the call details of his mobile were not investigated properly.
After investigating the Nanded blasts case the CBI had filed a charge sheet on March 15, 2008 against ten people; some alleged associates of Bajrang Dal including Sanjay Chowdhury, Yogesh Deshpande, Maruti Wagah, Gunniraj Thakur and Mahesh Pandey besides the two who died in the explosion.