BANGALORE: Nasir alias Ummer Haji is said to have told police that he is a member of the banned terror outfit Al Umma of Tamil Nadu (TN).
He is also said to have told them that he masterminded the Bangalore blasts to avenge the encounter deaths of Imam Ali and his four aides.
It may be recalled that Madurai police and Karnataka police, surrounded a house in MSR Nagar in the wee hours of September 29, 2002 and in a shootout, killed terrorist Imam Ali and his four aides Basheer alias Anwar (35), Mohammed Ibrahim (28), Seeniyappa alias Saifullah (30) and his wife Yasmeen (23), all from Madurai.
They had taken shelter there after escaping from TN.
Ali was a member of Jihad Committee, an outfit founded by the late Palani Baba in TN and was the prime accused in the bomb blast at RSS building in Chennai in August 1993, in which 11 people died. He was allegedly trained by Pakistan’s Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) and Hizbul Mujahideen.
Al Umma was responsible for the Coimbatore blasts. Abdul Nasser Madani, the chief of People’s Democratic Party in Kerala was named in that case. Nasir had close links with Madani too and it is possible that he was involved in the Coimbatore blasts.
Ali had planned blasts at ISKCON temple and Vidhana Soudha and in TN. He had plans to assassinate BJP leaders like L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.
However, the death of Ali and his aides made Nasir pressurise Sarfaraz Nawaz, the LeT man, to trigger blasts in Bangalore. Nasir would have been arrested or killed at the time of the shootout had he visited Ali’s rented house then.