New Delhi: On the run after a narrow escape from Jammu and Kashmir Police, Umar Un Nabi, the alleged suicide bomber who carried out the Red Fort blast, kept a low profile at his hideout in Haryana’s Nuh, to the extent of storing urine in polythene bags so as to avoid stepping out. All this while, Nabi kept up his pursuit of preparing explosives to carry out terror attacks, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has alleged in its chargesheet.
The urine tactic almost did Nabi in; a member of the landlord’s family noticed the foul smell coming from Nabi’s room, and complained to Soyab, a staffer of Al-Falah University who had sheltered Nabi when he was fleeing the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
Adding a sinister twist to Nabi’s urine trick is the NIA allegation that investigators recovered files in his pen drive containing elaborate explanations on making improvised explosives with urea nitrate, a compound classified as high explosive. It was put to use in attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, apart from being the core explosive material in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Nabi’s trail goes further back, all the way to Srinagar, where the police was probing a case of posters that came up on the outskirts of the city on 19 October, 2025, praising the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and threatening “revenge attacks”.
As part of the probe, the police arrested three overground workers, who led the police to a Shopian cleric named Irfan Ahmad Wagay. The cleric subsequently revealed that he was in touch with several doctors who were part of the same module. Based on those inputs, the police sent a team to Faridabad and Saharanpur, from where Dr Muzammil Shakeel Ganie and Dr Adil Ahmad Rather were arrested the same month.
Nabi stayed a step ahead, fleeing the Al-Falah University campus in Faridabad. He reached Nuh, where he was helped by Soyab in renting a room at the latter’s sister-in-law’s home in Hidayat Colony. Nabi stayed at the same location till 9 November before entering the national capital on 10 November.
“The lady of the house had observed that Nabi was keeping urine packed in a polybag, which was kept in the room. He did not go outside to dispose it off. For this reason, a foul smell was emanating from the room, regarding which she complained to Soyab,” the NIA alleged in the chargesheet, a copy of which ThePrint has seen.
“It is worthwhile to observe here that an innovative method for preparing explosive substances using urea nitrate has been elaborated in material seized from the pen drives of Shaheen Saeed and Nabi, seized respectively at the instances of Saaed and Bilal Naseer Malla, wherein an alternative method for the source of urea is mentioned, extracting urea from urine,” the agency further alleged.
Malla is another doctor from Al-Falah Medical College arrested and charged by the NIA for being a member of the terror module; Shaheen Saeed is another co-accused, married to Dr Ganie, and accused by the agency of funding the module to the tune of Rs 16 lakh. Ganie was appointed treasurer of the terror module for the operation code-named ‘AGuH interim’.
Based on the investigation and revelations made during the interrogation of Ganie and Rather, a joint team of the Jammu & Kashmir Police recovered almost 3,000 kg of IED-making material from two nearby locations, Dhouj village and Dehar Colony of Fatehpur Taga Village of Faridabad in separate raids, the second one on the day of the blast. The recovered material included ammonium nitrate, a highly inflammable substance suspected to have been used in the Red Fort blast.
Even as the second raid was being conducted, Umar was later seen entering Delhi through the Badarpur border in a Hyundai i20 car that later became the source of the explosion near Red Fort, killing 12 people and injuring around two dozen others.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)