Two Indian Mujahideen terrorists from Pakistan have been arrested from Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh and were planning to target policemen ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, police said on Thursday.
The duo, Murtaza and Faheem, got their training from a terror camp in Afghanistan, Inspector-General (law and order) Amrendra Kumar Sengar said.
The Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) of the State police arrested them from a railway station in Gorakhpur on Wednesday night.
“Murtaza alias Abdul Valid and Mohammad Owais alias Faheem, both residents of Karachi in Pakistan, were arrested by the ATS near railway station in Gorakhpur last night,” Mr. Sengar said.
The ATS team recovered two AK-47 rifles and its 70 cartridges, two .30 bore Chinese pistols, sim cards of India and Nepal, currencies of India, Nepal, Pakistan and the US and some other documents from them.
“During interrogation, the duo told ATS that they were residents of Pakistan. They also told the interrogators that they got 40-day training at a camp of Tehrik-e-Taliban in Afghanistan during 2010-11,” the officer said.
Besides physical training, they also learnt to operate AK-47 rifle, hand grenade, mortar and rocket launcher in the camp.
In 2013, the duo reached Nepal from Karachi through a flight and got their Indian identity by one Tausif, the IG said adding that they used to visit India and return to Nepal after getting inputs.
The police officer said the duo have confessed that they were planning to attack police personnel. “But the place of attack was not told to them,” the IG said.
The probe is on and ATS has also got some “vital information” from them, he said.
Since Saturday, five alleged IM operatives have been arrested from different parts of the country.
On March 25, 2014, Delhi Police virtually broke the back of the terror outfit by arresting its chief of Indian Operations Tehsin Akhtar alias Monu, who was wanted in a number of bombings in the country, from India-Nepal border in Darjeeling district of West Bengal.
His arrest came days after Special Cell nabbed another top IM operative Zia Ur Rehman alias Waqas from Ajmer in Rajasthan along with three of his associates.
