First arrest over India bombings
2013-03-04 15:01
New Delhi - Indian police on Monday said they had made
their first arrest in connection with last month's twin bombings, which killed
16 people in the southern city of Hyderabad.
An official from the National Investigating Agency (NIA),
a federal police unit that probes terror offences, said the suspect was
arrested in the eastern Indian city of Ranchi.
"A NIA team arrested Manzar Imam in Ranchi in
connection with the [Hyderabad] blasts," the official told AFP, asking not
to be named and giving no further details.
Senior Ranchi police officer Vipul Shukla said the NIA
had also been hunting for the man in connection with a string of bombings in
the western Indian city of Ahmedabad that claimed 56 lives in 2008.
"He would be taken to [the southern state of] Kerala
for interrogation by the NIA and Intelligence Bureau," Shukla told AFP by
telephone from Ranchi.
As well as the 16 deaths, some 117 were also injured when
two bombs exploded on 21 February in a mainly Hindu district in Hyderabad, a
hub of India's computing industry in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Newspapers have pointed the finger at the Indian
Mujahideen, a shadowy militant group that has claimed responsibility for
previous attacks but is seen by some experts as being simply a loose network of
extremists.
