Sixteen years after the bomb blasts that rocked several churches in the State, Karnataka CID arrested Sheikh Amir Ali (36), a terror suspect. The accused belonged to banned outfit Deendar Anjuman which had carried out the blasts in Bengaluru, Wadi and Hubballi in 2000. Sheikh was in hiding in Nalagonda district in Telangana from where he was arrested. A resident of Bengaluru, Sheikh went underground after the outfit came under police's radar.
In all 29 people were arrested in the serial bomb blasts, of whom 11 were given death sentence and 12 were awarded life term. However, seven others, including five terrorists from Pakistan, were absconding.
A sort of terror situation had been created following serial blasts at many churches across the State. There were two blasts at St Anne's Church, Wadi in Kalaburagi district and at St John's lutheran Church, Hubballi. Next day blasts took place at St Peter Paul Church, JJ Nagar, Bengaluru.
According to records, Deendar Anjuman was founded at the end of the 19th century by Hajarath Moulana Siddiqui, a scholar who tried to integrate all religions and studied all the holy scripts. At one stage, he had even argued that Islam was the base for all the religions and later called himself a reincarnation of Channabasaveshwara.
He wrote many books in Urdu and Kannada and translated some of the holy scripts. This landed him in trouble. He went on to establish Deendar Channabasaveshwara Anjuman in the 1920s and set up an ashram in Hyderabad, where he lived till his demise in 1952.