Mumbai, September 1
The UAE continues to be a major base for criminal and terrorist activities with last Monday’s twin blasts in Mumbai planned in that Persian Gulf state, according to the authorities here.

Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister Chagan Bhujbal and police officials said here that the two bomb blasts at Mumbai’s Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazar were planned by a UAE-based group called Hanif and executed by members of the city’s mafia.

Bhujbal told reporters today that the identity of ‘Hanif’ was unknown to the police till the arrest of five persons over last weekend.

Five persons, including three members of a single family, who were arrested for setting off the two car bombs, had provided important leads to the police on the hatching of the controversy, said police sources here.

The police, however, released the names of only four of the accused : Syed Mohammed Hanif Abdul Rahim (45); Fehmida Syed (37) and their daughter Farheen Syed (18) and a fourth person, Arshad Shafi Ahmed Ansari (26). The identity of the fifth person had still not been released by the police.

The police said this was the first time that women had been charged under POTA.

While three of them were produced before a special court of Judge A.P. Bhangale, Rahim was rushed to hospital as he became ill in police custody.

The police also seized more than 200 gelatin sticks from the house of the accused.

The police said, they had received important clues from taxi driver Shivnarayan Pandey who had transported the accused in his taxi to the Gateway of India. Pandey had escaped unhurt as he left for lunch just before the bomb went off.

According to investigators here, last Monday’s blasts were set off using RDX, an explosive used in the March 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai.

Prosecutors said the 1993 blasts were hatched by gangster Dawood Ibrahim and Pakistan’s ISI in Dubai. Though Ibrahim subsequently left the Emirates for Pakistan, members of other extremist groups like the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India had found refuge there, the police claimed.

Over the years, attempts by the Indian authorities to get wanted men deported from the UAE had mixed results.

In the past few months alone six persons had been deported from the UAE. These included Dawood’s brother Iqbal Kaskar, Anil Parab, Ejaz Pathan, Mustafa Dossa. Mohammad Altaf, a computer engineer from Aurangabad in Maharashtra and his associate Imran Khan, who was wanted for a series of blasts in Mumbai earlier this year, were also deported from Dubai.

However, the police said, the bigger fish had managed to slip away. Dawood himself was in the UAE for many years. His brother Anees Ibrahim, a prime accused in the 1993 serial bombings, was arrested and let of by the authorities in Dubai earlier this year, the police said.