The blast at the cafe earlier this month injured ten people. The Islamic State involvement would be no surprise, as it has significantly expanded its operations worldwide in recent years.
“NIA detains 1 in Bengaluru Rameshwaram Cafe blast probe; cracking terror tradecraft a challenge for investigating agencies,” Express News Service, March 13, 2024:
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Wednesday detained a man from Ballari who is alleged to have interacted with the main suspect involved in the blast at The Rameshwaram Cafe in Bengaluru on the night of March 1, around eight hours after the explosion, as the main suspect escaped from the Karnataka capital.
Identified as Syed Shabbir, police sources said his association with the main suspect in the cafe blast case is yet to be ascertained and that he was detained based on technical analysis. They added Shabbir is a resident of BUDA Bazaar in Ballari.
Despite the probe by the NIA and the Bengaluru police narrowing the identity of a suspect involved in The Rameshwaram Cafe blast down to an individual from the Shivamogga module of an Islamic State group, the efforts to nab the suspect and possible collaborators had remained a challenge on account of the group being adept in the usage of terror tradecraft.
The cafe blast suspect’s trail has been pieced together through the CCTV footage on his escape route travelled by two intra-state government buses to get to Ballari and travelled further to another unidentified destination, police sources said.
The CCTV trail of the suspect captured from buses and bus stops in Bengaluru and Ballari showed him arriving in Ballari, located around 300 km away from Bengaluru, at around 8.58 pm on March 1 after the blast at The Rameshwaram Cafe at 12.56 pm. The suspect was believed to have met an acquaintance in Ballari before travelling further towards Kalaburagi in a bus.
Festive offer
Between March 6 and 9, the NIA had questioned four members of an ISIS Ballari module, who are in prison after their arrest in December 2023, for possible clues on who the suspect in the blast case could have met in Ballari. The NIA took these four men into custody for interrogation after learning that The Rameshwaram Cafe blast suspect had used Ballari as a stop-over point during his escape from Bengaluru.Minaj alias Md Sulaiman, 26, Anas Iqbal Shaikh, 23, Shayan Rahman @Hussain, 26, and Syed Sameer, 19, from the Ballari ISIS module were taken into custody for three days to carry out investigations on March 6. They had earlier been arrested in December 2023 during an NIA crackdown on a Ballari ISIS module.
The investigations into The Rameshwaram Cafe blast case have narrowed down the identity of the suspect captured in dozens of CCTV footage of his arrival and exit from the cafe, as well as his arrival and exit from Bengaluru on the day of the crime, to a missing member from a Shivamogga module of ISIS busted by the state police and NIA between 2020 and 2023.
Abdul Taha Matheen and Mussavir Hussain Shazib, the two missing suspects from the Shivamogga module, have emerged as the main suspects in The Rameshwaram Cafe blast case….
Leave a Reply