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Rajasthan Muslims to appoint probe team

JAIPUR: Amid reports that the Rajasthan Government is considering handing over the probe into the May 13 serial blasts in Jaipur to a Central agency, Muslim groups here on Sunday announced that they would shortly appoint a “people’s investigation group” to nail down the real culprits.

The Rajasthan Muslim Forum – an umbrella body of community’s organisations – took exception to a “renewed drive” against madrasa teachers, imams and maulvis in the State in the aftermath of the blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, while wondering why the role of non-Muslim radical outfits was being completely ruled out.

Muslim Forum convenor Qari Moinuddin said the people’s investigation group would comprise civil rights activists, former judges, lawyers, former bureaucrats and journalists. “The panel will try to gather hard and clinching evidence about the perpetrators of the heinous crime and present it to the investigating agencies,” he added.

Though the group will work with the constraints of lack of official powers, its members will utilise their knowledge of investigation techniques, experience in public life and social contacts to launch the parallel probe and get to the root of the conspiracy to vitiate relations between communities and destabilise the country.

Mr. Moinuddin said the “false alarm” raised by the State police against members of the Muslim community after the Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts was serving no purpose except arousing suspicion in the majority community about Muslims and creating “panic and resentment” among the latter.

State Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria has admitted that the probe into the Jaipur blasts as well as the blast at Khwaja Moinudddin Chishti’s dargah in Ajmer on October 11 last year has not made any headway. He gave indications of transferring investigations to a Central agency which he said had a “well-established mechanism and intelligence network”.

Forum’s member and Jamat-e-Islami Hind State president Mohammed Salim said the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the State police had not paid any attention, despite being reminded umpteen times, to the possible role of the American and Israeli intelligence agencies whose track record in various countries as well as relations with some extremist outfits in India were well-known.

Mr. Salim said the people’s investigation group would scrutinise the facts and circumstances of blasts, meet the families of victims, pick up the leads left halfway by the SIT and try to find out who stood to benefit from the crime. “There is a glaring circumstantial evidence hinting towards the terror modules operating to benefit a certain section.”

The Muslim Forum felt that the serial blasts in the Karnataka and Gujarat capitals took place because the real culprits of the Jaipur blasts were not caught. Mr. Salim said the SIT’s failed attempt to pick up Maulana Abdul Matin in Varanasi and the latest detention of a maulvi in Banswara district would not serve any purpose other than “exacerbating confusion” and “intensifying resentment” against police.

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