BHOPAL: Uttar Pradesh Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) on Monday arrested a couple from east UP suspected to have Maoist links from a rented house in Bhopal, where they had been living for four-and-a-half years.
The couple, Manish Srivastava and Varsha alias Anita Srivastava, has been booked for waging/abetting war against the country, criminal conspiracy, forgery, cheating and fraud under the IPC.
According to UP Police sources, acting on intelligence inputs, ATS conducted raids in four cities, including one place in Kanpur, two places in Deoria district of east UP and the house where the couple lived on rent in Bhopal.
An ATS team raided the house of a mechanical engineer in Bhopal, where the couple was first questioned and later arrested.
The questioning revealed that they were living in the house by concealing their identity and forging documents.
The ATS sleuths also seized literature supporting left wing extremism (LWE) from the couple, besides some digital (social media) evidence, which will be used for further investigations.
The couple is in transit remand of UP ATS till July 12 and will be taken to Lucknow for detailed questioning.
After being sent into transit remand on Tuesday, the couple raised slogans of ‘Inqalab Zindabad’ in the Bhopal court premises.
While Manish did not respond to questions of journalists, Varsha said, “We don’t have links with any extremist outfit and were not doing anything anti-national.”
According to the couple’s neighbours in Bhopal, Manish had told the residents that he ran an NGO while his wife Varsha was a teacher at a school in Bhopal.
Varsha lived at the house while Manish visited for just a few days every month.