Missing link: Qureshi, the hardware engineer from Mumbai

At the press conference on the Ahmedabad blasts, the Gujarat Police mentioned a Mumbai-based technician...

At the press conference on the Ahmedabad blasts, the Gujarat Police mentioned a Mumbai-based technician who worked with a direct selling agency of Wipro as one of the vital links in the investigation of the blasts.

“We have his name, background and photograph and we are probing his role and level of involvement in the entire terror conspiracy… we are sure we will close in on him soon,” said Hemant Karkare, Joint Commissioner of Police (Anti Terrorist Squad), in Mumbai.

Who’s this elusive mastermind of the blasts? A computer hardware engineer and SIMI activist who has been on the run since the Mumbai train blasts of July 2006, Abdul Subban Qureshi alias Toukir is aged around 35. Though Gujarat and Maharashtra Police say they are still looking for him, officers in Karnataka believe he is already in the net.

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Qureshi’s name featured in recent investigations into a SIMI network in Karnataka, in a case that originated in Hubli and resulted in over a dozen arrests, including that of Safdar Nagori from Indore in March this year.

Qureshi, the computer hardware engineer, was a mainstay among a group of 32 people who attended training camps and meetings on the Karnataka-Goa border and in Karnataka over the past year in an effort to build a SIMI network, sources said. His name featured in the interrogation of three key persons — Adnan, P A Shibly and Yahya Kammukutty — all engineers, arrested in connection with the Hubli case.

Sources said Qureshi was sought by the Mumbai Police soon after the train blasts since he is believed to be an associate of Rahil Sheikh — the man named as the key cross-border perpetrator of the train blasts who is yet to be arrested.

Qureshi was tracked down to Bangalore in 2006 soon after the Mumbai blasts but disappeared, police sources said. During the Hubli investigations, it was revealed that Qureshi’s stay in Bangalore was facilitated by Shibly and Yahya.

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While the local network of SIMI operators in Karnataka has been largely broken through the course of the Hubli case, at least 10 persons whose names emerged during the probe, including Qureshi, remained untraceable.

In the course of the Hubli probe, Karnataka police also learnt that some members in the local SIMI group had visited a hill and forest training camp at Wagamon in Kerala, sources said.

(with ENS in Mumbai)