By Syed Zubair Ahmad
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) special court extended the custody of Abdul Mateen Taha and Mussavir Hussain, accused in the Bengaluru Rameshwaram cafe blast case, by seven days until April 29. The NIA arrested them on April 12 in West Bengal.
The accused appeared before the NIA special court on Monday as their initial custody period expired. The court granted the NIA a three-day transit remand for the accused following their arrest. The anti-terror agency alleges that Hussain planted the bomb at the cafe, while Mateen Taha orchestrated the blast.
Both accused individuals were already wanted in a 2020 terrorism case. According to the NIA, Taha was associated with the Bengaluru Module of ISIS-Al Hind. The duo were on the run and have evaded arrests since 2019.
The mysterious cap played a ‘crucial’ role in helping the police identify the accused
The alleged prime suspect was traced through the cap he was wearing during the blast. Immediately after the blast, the NIA recovered the cap. The Tamil Nadu team discovered that Shazib and his accomplice Abdil Mathern Taha had purchased the cap from a mall in Mylapore, Chennai, and stayed in a lodge at Triplicane.
Upon closer examination of the image, NIA investigators noted down the serial number on the cap and traced it back to the shop in the mall where it was sold in January.
However, the method of tracing a cap seller through the number on a cap is still debatable. Typically, items are traced through barcodes placed on merchandise, but wearable items like caps often have separate barcode tags that are removed before use.
This incident recalls a case from March 2013 when a constable from the Special Cell in Delhi used a sun cap to plant a bag full of explosives at a local guest house in Old Delhi, attempting to implicate an ex-Kashmiri militant Syed Liaqat Ali Shah who had entered India through the Gorakhpur border under a rehabilitation program by the J&K government. The misconduct of the Special Cell came to light with the intervention of Omar Abdullah, the then Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir. Subsequently, the court acquitted Liaqat Ali Shah of all charges.
The accused entered Bengal and arrested within two hours
After the arrest of Abdul Matheen Taha and Mussavir Hussain Shazib, the two accused in Bengaluru’s Rameshwaram cafe blast case, from West Bengal on April 12, the Bharatiya Janata Party promptly accused the ruling Trinamool Congress of turning the state into a safe haven for terrorists under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s leadership.
Mamata, addressing a 2024 Lok Sabha election rally in Cooch Behar, slammed the BJP for “propaganda” and said the two accused were not Bengal natives and had just “hid in Bengal for two hours”.
“They [BJP] have a propaganda specialist. The blast took place in Bengaluru. Even the accused persons hail from Karnataka. They are not from Bengal. They hid in Bengal for two hours and our police apprehended them in two hours,” she said.
The NIA has a history of implicating Muslims in false terror cases
In his extensively researched book titled “Brahminist Bombed, Muslims hanged,” SM Mushrif, a former Inspector General of Police, Maharashtra has exposed over 60 terror related cases in which accused belonging to RSS, BJP, Bajrang Dal, etc. were let off and innocent persons were arrested only on the basis of their confessional statements recorded under duress. More than four years have passed since the book was released, but so far, nobody has challenged its contents.
The NIA and ATS in the states had been routinely protecting the real culprits and prosecuting innocent persons, but nobody questioned – neither courts, nor media, nor politicians, nor ‘honest’ intellectuals. Those whom we call ‘honest’ may be monetarily or materially honest, but they are definitely not intellectually honest. Everybody believed the version of the ATS or the NIA and took their statements as gospel truth. That is perhaps why ATS and NIA require more Sadanand Dates.