Disquiet in Bharatpur over three ‘Jaipur’ arrests: cleric, teacher and a 15-year-old boy

Eighteen-year-old Zubair Khan says he came running to the Jamia Darul Uloom mosque in Bharatpur’s Idgaah Colony...

Eighteen-year-old Zubair Khan says he came running to the Jamia Darul Uloom mosque in Bharatpur’s Idgaah Colony on Monday night after frantic calls from his mother Saira Khatun. “She called to say that my father had gone missing after a few policemen took him to the local chowki and there is no trace of him since Friday night,” he says.

A student of Class X at a seminary in Uttar Pradesh’s Khatoli tehsil, Zubair, eldest of six siblings, today finds himself in charge of the mosque his father founded more than a decade ago, after the Special Investigation Team from Jaipur took him away on May 22.

His father Mohammad Iliyas (38), better known as cleric and manager of the Jamia Darul Uloom mosque in Bharatpur, has been detained by the SIT for interrogation in connection with the Jaipur serial blasts that killed 66 people this month. Within minutes of the detention, the police also raided the mosque and his house and seized a computer, a mobile phone and few diaries.

Story continues below this ad

Iliyas’s arrest came barely a week after Delhi Police arrested Mohammad Iqbal, alias Abdur Rehman from New Delhi Police Station saying he was a militant of the Harkat-ul-Jehadi-Islami (HuJI) and knew about the Jaipur blasts.

And even as the local police remain tight-lipped about Iliyas’s detention — City Circle Office Ratanlal Bhargav says he “doesn’t know anything about the detentions” — the people at his mosque are talking about the other two who have also been detained: Hafiz Hakimuddin, a teacher at the mosque’s madarsa from Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, and 15-year-old local boy Kamil who ran a telephone booth opposite the mosque.

Kamil’s father Mohammad Yasin, a painter by profession, says the police took his son away in his absence without giving any reason. “I was not here when they took him away. I am just too shocked and I don’t know what to do. I went to meet him in police lock up until Sunday and now he is not there. If the police today says they did not pick up my son, I don’t even know where to find him and who to blame,” he said.

Said Mukhtar Ahmad, a teacher at the mosque’s seminary: “Iliyas Bhai is someone I know for the last eight years. He taught me at this seminary before I could begin teaching and he always spoke about being patriotic towards our country. He even organized Independence Day celebrations at the mosque with great zeal.”

Story continues below this ad

As an example, Ahmad points out to the thick congregation of children swelling around him who study at the seminary. “They are all taught here for free. And, this is so peaceful a place that you can only find a wooden stick here to drive away dogs,” he adds.

Ahmad adds that contrary to police’s claims that Iliyas was a Bangladeshi national, his family — mother and sister — stayed at his native village in Mewat in Haryana. “There is no water in the neighbouring Idgaah colony. All the children who come from the colony carry water to their homes from here after Iliyas put a tap connection outside the mosque,” he says.

Into the sixth day of Iliyas’s detention, the mosque’s office — from where the police seized the only computer that was, mosque staff says, brought to teach the children — remains closed. Iliyas’s business of mining stones and agriculture too is put on hold even as wife Saira is being treated for depression. But classes for children — about 200 — still continue with the 15-member staff at the mosque in attendance.