Terror email: Rajkot cyber cafe owner held

The Crime Branch here has launched a manhunt for the sender of an e-mail in September 2008,two months before terror struck Mumbai.....

The Crime Branch here has launched a manhunt for the sender of an e-mail in September 2008,two months before terror struck Mumbai,specifically threatening attacks on Mumbais CST railway station and Churchgate.

Trailing the IP address,the cops zeroed in on Dream Cyber Cafe in Tagore Road. The mail was sent to a Hindi TV channel,in the name of Al Mujahideen. On Monday,the police finally arrested the Internet cafe owner Magan Patel from Gundiyala village of Kutch district. The police said the cyber cafe has 10 PCs,one of which was used to send the e-mail.

According to the cops,Patel was running the cafe without a licence and did not keep the mandatory log of customers,making it difficult to trace the name of the email sender. Patel has been arrested for the running cafe without a licence, said Inspector J S Pandya. Commissioner of Police Geeta Johri said the Crime Branch was now trying to trace the sender.

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Unlike the Indian Mujahideen which had claimed responsibility for the Jaipur,Bangalore and Ahmedabad serial blasts,Al-Mujahideen was a new name in the terror spectrum,the police said.

However,two places named in the email were the actually targeted places in November.

The Mumbai Police was informed about the email on September 17,2009 and it had traced the mails source to Rajkot within a couple of days. The Mumbai cops promptly passed on the information to Gujarat Police headquarters,which referred it to the Rajkot crime branch. But soon after the crime branch team went to Patels cafe for preliminary investigation,he went missing. The police said he had remained untraceable since.