Bengaluru: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) Wednesday conducted raids at over four locations in Karnataka, including at a building in Thirthahalli taluk of Shivamogga district owned by a person with alleged links to Mohammed Shariq — main accused in the Mangaluru cooker blast case — said sources in the ED.
The building also houses an office of the Congress run by Kimmane Ratnakar, former minister from Thirthahalli. Sources, however, clarified that the raid was not on the Congress office but on the said building which happens to house the office.
The raids were conducted to probe “terror financing” in connection to the blast case of 19 November, 2022.
According to sources, the ED has registered a fresh case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to probe “money generated for terror activities” and where it has been spent.
This comes a day after the National Investigation Agency arrested two more persons in connection with the case — two persons had been arrested earlier this month.
Ratnakar told ThePrint that it was the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that had visited the Congress office to collect documents of the property which was leased in 2015 for a period of eight years from persons allegedly related to Shariq.
Shariq was one of two people wounded in a low-intensity blast on 19 November after an IED (improvised explosive device) placed in a pressure cooker he was carrying — allegedly to its intended target area — had exploded. The other person injured was the driver of the auto he was travelling in near Kankanadi in Mangaluru.
“We took the lease in 2015 for a period of eight years from a person named Asim (Abdul Majid) for Rs 10 lakh. The lease duration will end in June this year and we have asked for our lease amount to be returned so that we can vacate this space. Asim is no more and we are not aware of this person’s family or relatives,” said Ratnakar.
The Karnataka Home Minister’s office told reporters it was the ED that carried out searches of the Congress office and several other places in the district. Araga Jnanendra, Karnataka’s minister for home affairs, is the incumbent legislator from Thirthahalli.
And while sources in the ED have said the Congress office was not the target of the raid, it has not taken the BJP long to comment on the incident.
“It is not surprising that a Congress link emerges with the Mangaluru cooker blast terror case… Remember Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra spent considerable time in Karnataka and Congress leaders have always been sympathetic to the PFI, the now banned radical terror outfit,” Amit Malviya, the chief of BJP’s IT cell, said in a twitter post Wednesday.
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‘BJP trying to cover its failures’
Shariq, in his mid-20s, has at least three cases registered against him, including one in which he was accused of painting a graffiti in support of Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2020 in Mangaluru, and in another where he was allegedly involved in a stabbing incident in neighbouring Shivamogga district last year.
In the aftermath of the stabbing, Shariq is believed to have travelled to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, then on to Kerala and to Mysuru in Karnataka where he rented a home using a fake Aadhaar card and stored bomb-making materials. He resurfaced in November due to the blast.
The Mangaluru blast had fuelled a war of words between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress with the former accusing the latter of maintaining links with terrorist elements.
The Congress, in its response, had accused the government of intelligence failure that could add to communal tensions in the poll-bound state.
In December, the BJP had tried to corner the Congress over comments made by the party’s state chief D.K. Shivakumar, who said the government had branded Shariq as a “terrorist” even before the probe had been completed.
In mid-December, Shivakumar had said the BJP was trying to deflect attention away from more scandals like voter theft and other failures over the incident, which was widely criticised by the ruling party.
(With Inputs from Ananya Bhardwaj)
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