Burdwan blast: Arrested JMB state head used to look after outfit's finances

Kolkata: The arrested head of West Bengal unit of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Anwar Hussain Farooq, used to look after the finances of the outfit, police said on Tuesday.

This fact came to light during investigation of the respective roles of the six arrested JMB militants.

"He (Farooq alias Inam) was looking after the financial part of the outfit and being the head of the JMB's West Bengal unit, he is the most important among the six arrested," a senior officer of the Kolkata Police said.

Farooq, a resident of Bangladesh's Jamalpur, was carrying a laptop at the time of his arrest from the border area of Bongaon in North 24 Parganas.

"Encrypted files in the laptop have been found and we have cracked some of these. But the details of the other files are yet to be recovered. For that purpose we are taking the help of technical people," the officer in the force's Special Task Force (STF) said.

A diary was also recovered from Farooq's possession in which the outfit's "tree" in West Bengal is jotted down.

He is wanted in connection with several cases in the neighbouring country.

"That will be quite crucial but most of these names can be pseudonyms," the IPS officer said.

On Maulana Yusuf aka Yusuf Sheikh, described as the second man-in-command of the JMB's unit in the state, he said, "Going by hierarchy, this person was definitely another important man. Many of the madrasas in West Bengal were under his supervision. He was the chief motivator and had visited madrasas in Simulia a couple of month's ago.

A madrasa in Simulia in Burdwan district was linked to the Khagragarh blast case.

Police officials said they were in touch with their counterparts in Bangladesh and a team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) also visited the Kolkata Police headquarter at Lalbazar.

On their mode of communication, the officer said they used messengers to pass on instructions and never used Facebook or any other form of social media to communicate.

"Only one app-based system was used but that also rarely. Otherwise they had messengers to pass on instructions," he said, adding, Yusuf never used even mobile phones.