The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Monday submitted a detailed chargesheet on the Burdwan blast and disclosed that militant outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) set up a terror network in Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand and other places to bring down the Sheikh Hasina Government in Bangladesh. The chargesheet was submitted 180 days after the accidental blast at Khagragarh in Burdwan district that blew the lid off a deep-rooted trans-border conspiracy.
The 164-page document submitted at a city court in Kolkata named 21 people, including four Bangladeshis. The NIA also petitioned the court to declare eight people as absconders whose names appear in the chargesheet and are traceless. The agency said that the accused people were “involved in the JMB-hatched conspiracy to overthrow the existing democratic Government through violent terrorist acts and replace it with hard-line Sharia-based Islamic rule”.
The NIA officials said the 21 accused have been charged for offences relating to terrorist acts like conspiracy, recruitment, funding and running terror camps. The chargesheet recorded the statements of about 250 witnesses and incriminating evidences gathered from about 100 places throughout Bengal, Jharkhand and Assam. It stated how the terrorist outfits had set up an extensive network across madrasas and other places in these States.
On the activities of the JMB it says its activities in India primarily included recruitment, radicalisation and training of vulnerable youth in a systematic and organised manner. The NIA document showed how the terrorists had mastered the art of bomb-making by setting up such hideouts after indoctrinating vulnerable people in various places. In Bengal, the organisation had set up networks in Burdwan, Murshidabad, Nadia, Birbhum and Malda, the statement said. Two persons had been killed in the accidental blast while they were making bombs at a house at Khagragarh in Burdwan. The names of the two dead had been expunged from the chargesheet.
Before the NIA had taken up the investigation, the State police in its initial inquiry had failed to find vital clues and had even tried to let the incident pass off as an outcome of a clash between the two political outfits as also an accidental blast of a gas cylinder. Subsequently it was found that on the ground of the building in which the blast occurred ran a local office of the ruling Trinamool Congress. This whereas local sources said the property belonged to a local TMC leader. The TMC sources however, denied any connection with the occupants of the house.