Bengaluru blast accused were caught repeatedly changing hotels by keeping Hindu names, what is the connection with ISIS?

Bangalore. After 42 days of investigation in the Rameshwaram cafe blast case, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday arrested two accused Musavir Hussain Shajib and Abdul Mathin Taha from West Bengal. For the last one and a half month, both the accused were hiding by changing their identities. Now CCTV footage of him booking a hotel has surfaced.

According to the information, the accused were hiding in the same pattern for 42 days. Agencies were keeping an eye on this. According to sources, both of them stayed only in guesthouses and private lodges where verification was not forced. After the arrest of both of them, they were produced in the court from where the central agency has been given three-day transit remand of both the persons.

The accused are residents of Tirthahalli in Shivamogga district of Karnataka. Officials said Shajib had planted the improvised explosive device (IED) in the cafe and Taha was the mastermind behind planning and executing the blast. A day after the arrest of Shajib and Taha, new CCTV footage of both the accused has surfaced. Both can be seen checking in to a guest house, which is said to be located in Ekbalpur, Kolkata.

Shajib and Taha had checked in to this guest house on March 25 and stayed there for three days. They had told the employees that they were tourists from Karnataka and Maharashtra. Hotel receptionist Ashraf Ali told news agency ANI that he came on March 25 and showed his identity card and we gave him a room. He checked out from the hotel on 28 March. When NIA officials arrived, they saw the admission register and started investigation.

According to Ashraf Ali, we do not provide food inside the hotel, so both of them used to go outside to eat. He paid in cash and booked only one room. Ali said that both of them used their regional languages ​​to communicate with each other. Abdul Mathin Taha, said to be the mastermind behind the Bengaluru cafe blast, also used Hindu names as aliases at various places of residence. Even the wanted poster for the accused stated that he was using Hindu identity documents, fake names like Vignesh or other similar fake ID documents.

Before their arrest, both were living in a lodge in New Digha for the last four days. He had changed many places in Bengal. Shajib had used the fake Aadhaar card of Yasha Shahnawaz Patel of Palghar, Maharashtra in two hotels in Kolkata. Whereas Taha had used fake names like Vignesh BD of Karnataka in one hotel and Anmol Kulkarni in another.

Then, at another hotel, they took the identities of Sanjay Aggarwal and Uday Das, hailing from Jharkhand and Tripura respectively, The Times of India reported. While Taha is an IT engineer, it is suspected that Shajib is a key influencer in the Shivamogga-based module of the Islamic State (IS). News18 has learned that investigators believe Taha used the cryptocurrency route to finance the operation.

The agency had told the court that some electronic gadgets and about 70 articles were seized from the two men. Some reports say that Shajib, Taha and another suspect Sharif, all linked to the ISIS module, were involved in the Shivamogga graffiti case as well as the Mangaluru cooker blast case reported in November 2023.

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Tags: Bengal news, Bengaluru News, Crime News