Ahmedabad: The Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) has arrested four persons for their alleged involvement in the Bombay serial bomb blasts, which killed 257 persons and injured over 700 others on March 12, 1993. Based on a specific information about the presence of four suspicious persons in Ahmedabad, a team was formed under Deputy Superintendent of Police, Kanubhai Patel, which detained the four persons from the Sardarnagar area on the evening of May 12.
Initially, the four accused were booked for carrying forged Indian passports. The arrested persons had Indian passports with the following names -- Javed Basha alias Qasim Saab, Syed Abbas Sharif alias Syed Abbas, Syed Yasin alias Abdul Rahman, and Mohammad Yusuf Ismail alias Sheikh Ismail Noor Mohammad. They had obtained these persons using fake address documents. As per the ATS, after their real identities were revealed, the police found that the four accused were allegedly involved in the 1993 serial bomb blasts.
The real identities of the accused persons were found to be Abu Bakar alias Abdul Gafoor (Javed Basha); Syed Qureshi alias Rahat Jan Qureshi (Syed Abbas Sharif); Mohammad Shoaib Qureshi alias Shoaib Bawa (Syed Yasin); and Mohammad Yusuf Ismail alias Yusuf Bhatka (Mohammad Yusuf Ismail). Sources said that all the four persons were wanted for their alleged involvement in the 1993 serial blasts, and were on the run to this day. They were all members of a smuggling gang run by Mohammad Ahmed Dosa alias Mohammad Dosa, and were involved in the smuggling of gold and silver in India in the 1980s and 1990s.