Another ‘terror colony’ found in Bengal

BOLPUR: A row of locked houses, barely four kilometres from the Visva Bharati University in Tagore’s Santiniketan, caught the attention of the NIA team on Saturday. This was a week after the team identified a similar cluster of houses at Muluk in Bolpur.
One of them, so close to Visva Bharati, belonged to Habibur Seikh, a most-wanted in the Burdwan blast case. Habibur was a close aide of Kausar, who is now absconding.At a distance stood three houses beside the canal — all under lock and key. They belonged to Mithu Seikh, Taleha Seikh and Abdul Malek.
Their mentor Dalim Seikh used to live nearby. NIA members interrogated the mothers of Habibur and Mithu Seikh. They had to break open the locks of the other houses because there was no one inside. The houses have no free space in between and this raised the suspicion that a secret passage could be somewhere within. The NIA team collected the bullet that was found lying in the courtyard of Taleha Sheikh for the last four days. Investigators raided all the houses and came out with documents and a laptop.
On Tuesday last, Habibur’s mother Jyotsna Bibi told the media that her son had no connection with his family for the last two years. She also told that there was a jihadi group in the village and Dalim, Malek and Taleha ran that gang. She had told earlier that her son was ‘brain-washed’ by the ‘Jihadis’ and they took her son away. Jyotsna Bibi told this to the NIA team on Saturday.

NSG and NIA in assistance with police personnel operation going on at Simulia Madrasa in Burdwan following the Khagragar blast and related extremist operation in the area, abouty 120kms from Kolkata.
According to Muluk panchayat sources, the land on which the houses of Mithu, Taleha and Abdul were built did not have proper land right.
Rousana Bibi, mother of Mithu Seikh, told NIA officials that her son had gone to Mitrapur, a village in Rampurhat subdivision to visit their ancestral houses but had not returned back. NIA officials visited the house twice.
Surprisingly, though, almost all the villagers knew them, they attended namaz along with others in the local mosque but they ‘did not imagine any terror connection with them’.
On condition of anonymity, a youth said, “The land on which Dalim Seikh constructed the house belonged to my family. My father had sold it to our neighbour from whom Dalim had purchased the land four years ago. Dalim purchased it at very high price.”
The trio, Mithu, Taleha and Abdul, had plans to purchase the adjacent land too, a villager said.