New Delhi: More terror plots planned by the five accused Hindu extremists arrested by the Maharashtra ATS squad have come to light, with the agency informing a court that the suspects planned to plant explosives at the annual Sunburn music festival held in Pune. The suspects were also involved in throwing petrol bombs outside two cinema halls playing the Hindi movie Padmaavat earlier this year. According to Hindustan Times, the accused wanted to target the Pune music festival because they considered it to be ‘against Hindu culture’, while Padmaavat had offended several right-wing groups on the grounds that the movie ‘hurt Hindu sentiments’.

All five suspects arrested earlier this month by the ATS have links to right-wing group Sanatan Sanstha, though the organisation has denied they were members of the self-proclaimed ‘spiritual group’. On Tuesday, ATS prosecutors presented Vaibhav Raut, Sharad Kalaskar, Sudhanya Gondhalekar and Shrikant Pangarkar before a court constituted to try Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act cases. The fifth accused, Avinash Pawar, would be produced in court on Friday. The court extended the custody of the four suspects by seven days.

ATS told the court that Gondhalekar and Raut wanted to plant explosives the Pune Sunburn festival last December, besides being implicated in a petrol bomb throwing incident outside cinema halls in Kalyan (in Thane district), and Belagavi in Karnataka which were screening Padmaavat. The prosecutors also stated that the suspects intended to attack individuals, who in their opinion, were “against the Hindu religion”. Earlier, a CBI team had told a special court that some of the accused in the murder of activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh had links with the assassins of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar. Members of Sanatan Sanstha are also suspected to be involved in the killing of communist Govind Pansare, while the same gun was used to assassinate Lankesh and professor M.M. Kalburgi.

The Hindustan Times report also said that Atulchandra Kulkarni, the chief of Maharashtra ATS, did not want to confirm the names of the targeted individuals because it would pose a security threat to them. Hindustan Times stated that among those targeted were an author-historian, a former Marathi newspaper editor and three Marathi authors and playwrights, but did not disclose their names.

Revealing more details about the possessions seized from the accused, ATS officials said that one of the three bikes recovered from Nalla Sopara and Pune may have been used in the murder of Lankesh in Bengaluru in September 2017. The bike is apparently owned by Kalaskar.

The raids also led to the seizure of ten pistols, one air pistol, one country-made revolver, ten pistol barrels, six pistol bodies, six magazines, three handmade magazines, one half-prepared country-made revolver and seven hand-made pistols from Gondhalekar.