Guwahati: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) sleuths probing the West Bengal's Burdwan blast case has said that a key suspect identified as Shahanoor Alam has accepted of chalking out a plan to assassinate Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and stage a coup there.
The officials said that they uncovered the plot against Hasina while investigating the blast case. According to reports, during police interrogation, Alam has accepted the assassination plot and has also revealed many other secret information regarding the matter.
Shahanoor Alam, an alleged motivational trainer of terror group Jamaat-ul- Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), was arrested by the NIA along with the help of state police on late Friday night.
"He was caught last night hiding in his relative's house in a village in Nalbari district," police said.
Soon after his arrest, Alam was remanded to 14 days police custody yesterday, following a Guwahati court's order. But, Alam reportedly told jurno's outside the court that he had surrendered to police.
But Assam's Director General of police Khagen Sharma contradicted that, saying: "Jihadis are not allowed to surrender. He was arrested."
Alam, 36, had been on the run since October 2, when two members of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh were killed in an explosion while building homemade bombs in Burdwan in West Bengal.
His wife, 36, was arrested in Guwahati on November 8 on the same charges as her husband.
Ealier also, NIA had said that all the accused and their associates involved in Burdwan blast case were members of the Bangladeshi terror outfit and were preparing IEDs to be transported to Bangladesh for possible terror attack there.
The accidental blast took place on October 2, inside a house in Khagragarh killing two JMB militants and injuring another. Probing the blast, the NIA has arrested several people including Bangladeshi nationals.
The NIA team during its investigation over the last few months seized a large number of books and documents, 12 trunks and a car from a madrasa in Burdwan district where the Khagragarh blast accused were suspected to have been radicalised in Jihadi ideology.
Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen was thought to have been lying low since authorities cracked down on it after it detonated nearly 500 bombs almost simultaneously on one day in 2005 across Bangladesh, including in the capital, Dhaka.
Mainly-Muslim Bangladesh has suffered three major army coups and two dozen smaller rebellions since gaining independence from Pakistan in 1971 in a war that killed and displaced millions.
(With Agency inputs)
