Delhi Police today claimed it had alerted its Bihar counterpart and intelligence agencies about terror threat to Bodh Gaya temple in Bihar and also told investigators that Mumbai is on the radar of terror outfits, a senior police official said today.
The Delhi Police official said they had got the inputs about the threat from a group of Indian Mujahiddin (IM) operatives, who were arrested in 2012 in the Pune blasts case and had done a recee in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bodh Gaya to carry out blasts.
The police officer said that during interrogation, one of the IM operatives had said they were planning to target the temple to retaliate against the alleged atrocities done on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
"The input was given on the basis of information we had obtained from a group of IM terrorists arrested in 2012 in the Pune blasts case," the official said.
He also said that a team of Delhi Police is planning to visit Bodh Gaya to help and share the information it had received from IM operatives with the security agencies investigating the blasts.
According to the police, IM operatives had told them that they were planning Pune-like blasts in Delhi, Bihar, Mumbai and Hyderabad. For this they had specifically spent around two weeks doing a recce of the temple town, it said.
The arrested IM operatives, Sayed Maqbool, Imran Khan, Asad Khan and Irfan, who were arrested in October 2012, had told the police that they had recced JJ Hospital and nearby places in Mumbai for a terror strike, the officer said.
Imran had reportedly introduced Maqbool to Riyaz Bhatkal, a key IM man who is now believed to be in Pakistan, he said.
Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar had stated after the arrest of the IM operatives in October 2012, that "they had also planned to attack Bodh Gaya temple in Bihar... We have informed the Bihar Police and asked them to step up security in the temple premises".
