India’s anti-terror investigating agency said Sunday it arrested a man from Indian-controlled Kashmir on suspicion of conspiring with a suicide bomber to carry out a deadly car blast in the capital New Delhi.
The National Investigating Agency said in a statement that the car that exploded on Monday was registered to Amir Rashid Ali, who it alleged had traveled to New Delhi from Indian-controlled Kashmir to facilitate the purchase of the vehicle. It said Ali's arrest was a “major breakthrough” in the case.
The explosion killed 10 people and injured 32 others near the city’s historic Red Fort. Indian officials called it a “heinous terror incident” carried out by “anti-national forces.”
The car blast happened hours after police in Kashmir said they had dismantled a suspected militant cell operating from the disputed region, arresting at least seven people, including two Kashmiri doctors from Indian cities, and seizing a large quantity of bomb-making material.
The investigating agency identified the car’s driver and suspected suicide bomber as Umar Un Nabi, also a Kashmiri, a doctor teaching at a medical college in the city of Faridabad, near New Delhi. Government forces blew up his family home in the southern district of Pulwama on Thursday night, officials said, as a reprisal for the attack.
Indian security agencies also have carried out a series of raids across Kashmir as part of their investigation, questioning thousands and detaining hundreds of people.
On Friday night, some of the explosives confiscated from Faridabad and brought to Kashmir’s main city of Srinagar by the police detonated inside a police station, killing at least nine people and injuring 32 others.
