The suspected killers of Hindu Samaj Party founder Kamlesh Tiwari owned up their crime and told their interrogators that they snuffed out the Hindu outfit leader for his blasphemous statements on Prophet Mohammed.
Both accused will be produced in a Lucknow court on Friday.
Sources in the Anti-Terrorists Squad who interrogated the suspects, Ashfaq Hussain and Moinuddin of Surat, revealed that Ashfaq led the operation while Moinuddin assisted him in murdering Tiwari.
As per their confessions, Rashid, who was arrested a day after the murder, funded them to execute the crime. The plan to eliminate the Hindu outfit leader was chalked out after Rashid returned from Mumbai.
Both killers were given a brief training on using weapons (knife and pistol) about a month before the murder. They purchased the pistol for Rs 50,000 from a man in Surat while the knife was bought from a local market there.
A day before leaving for their sinister ‘mission’, Ashfaq told his parents that he was going to Chandigarh to join a new job.
Both the killers took Udhyog Nagri Express train on October 17 and travelled in a sleeper class coach to reach Kanpur the next day. The tickets were booked by their handlers.
On reaching Kanpur, they hired a taxi to reach Lucknow and were to stay in a hotel in Charbagh locality near the railway station. But the taxi driver brought them to a hotel in Naka Hindola area. On reaching the hotel, the suspects got the earlier booking of hotel room cancelled.
The sources further said that Ashfaq had informed mastermind Sayyed Asim Ali of Nagpur, who was also arrested, about the successful execution of his plan.
Ashfaq told interrogators that he was upset after going through Kamlesh’s videos which he uploaded on the net, and planned to eliminate him.
After leaving the hotel, both travelled by a bus to Bareilly where they were helped by a local cleric, who facilitated medical help to Moinuddin as he suffered injuries during the attack on Kamlesh in his Khurshedbagh office-cum-residence on October 18.
The sources in the ATS said that the teams were hunting for Naved, who guided the killers about the escape route. The assailants continued to move here and there after coming to know about the police hunt .
“A local resident in Gujarat was in contact with Ashfaq’s parents and he helped him and Moinuddin to reach Gujarat where both were nabbed by a Gujarat ATS team,” the sources said.
They said that their escape from UP, where they spent over 120 hours and travelled six districts of west UP, and their arrest by Gujarat ATS left the UP Police disappointed a tad.
On Thursday, the interrogators posed a set of 500 questions and the two suspects were interrogated separately and later together.
The sources in the ATS said that the killers were asked about the motive behind the murder, the number of their followers, their jobs and their links with those spreading religious fanaticism. The cops also grilled them about their visit to different cities, religious places and districts.
Ashfaq told the interrogators that he never visited Lucknow and he reached Kamlesh’s house with the help of Google Maps.
It also surfaced that Moinuddin also had made a fake Facebook account like Ashfaq.
The suspects were also interrogated by agencies like ATS and Special Task Force and they were also confronted with the conspirators.
The Gujarat Police had arrested Maulana Mohsin Sheikh, Faizan Yunus and Rashid Ahmed from Surat while Maharashtra ATS had nabbed Sayyed Asim from Nagpur for conspiracy to kill Tiwari and aiding the suspects in executing their nefarious design.