LONG ARM OF THE LAW

Maharashtra cops fan out all over India

By Mateen Hafeez I TNN
Mumbai: Over a hundred police personnel from Maharashtra — most of them posted in Mumbai — have fanned out all over the country, working on the probe into Terror Tuesday in states ranging from Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Tamil Nadu in the south.

Senior officials say the police in this state or the city have not seen an operation on such a scale, either numerically or geographically, ever.

And these men have been at it for the past few days, say officials, though the first breakthroughs were revealed only on Friday. These 100-plus personnel were divided into approximately 20 teams, a senior police official said on Saturday.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad of Mumbai Police, with 18 teams on the field, is at the vanguard of the pan-India operation and is being backed up by personnel from the state’s Criminal Intelligence Department (CID), the Special Branches (SBs) and the State Intelligence Department (SID).

These teams are are hunting for leads in Bangalore (Karnataka), Rajasthan, Gujarat, New Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) and Tamil Nadu. Besides, the men are also combing over 10 districts in Maharashtra itself.

The last state to be covered in this gigantic sweep is Tamil Nadu. A police team from Mumbai left for Coimbatore on Saturday soon after they got information about the detention of five persons who were detained there for their alleged links with terror outfits.

But the traffic has not been all one-way. Madhya Pradesh additional director-general of police (intelligence) S K Raut also visited the city and exchanged intelligence with senior ATS officials. The state districts being visited include Beed, Aurangabad, Parbhani, Kolhapur, Nanded and Pune. A host of detentions and several rounds of interrogation have followed the search operations.

State DGP P S Pasricha held a meeting, soon after the seven blasts on seven trains bombings, with the commissioner of Mumbai Police, the ATS chief, the Government Railway Police chief, the SID additional director-general of police and the joint commissioner of police (SB) and asked them for a joint operation. Officials say what the country is witnessing now is a follow-up of that meeting.

The Times of India, July 23, 2006