November 07, 2013 12:09 IST

The Indian Mujahideen planned to kill Narendra Modi before he reached the venue of his Patna rally but aborted the plan because of the thick security cover, reports Vicky Nanjappa.

There has been a lot of buzz among investigation agencies about the Indian Mujahideen’s new Ranchi module, which carried out the serial blasts in Patna, ahead of theBharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi's rally on October 27.

Further probe has revealed the deadly plan of the module, which operates from Sithio near the Jharkhand capital. Plan A was to eliminate Modi at the hotel he checked in on the day of the rally. The hotel is around 200 metres away from Gandhi Maidan, the venue of Modi’s rally. The Gujarat chief minister and other BJP leaders including party chief Rajnath Singh had checked into the hotel a few hours prior to the address.

Imtiaz Ansari, a suspect in the Patna blasts case, told National Investigating Agency officials during interrogation that he along with other operatives had planned to plant bombs at the hotel as Modi was about to leave for Gandhi Maidan. “We had planned to open indiscriminate fire to eliminate him. Also on our hit list was Rajnath Singh,” Ansari told NIA officials. “However we had to abort the plan as it appeared extremely risky. We realised that they had good security cover.”

NIA officials said that after Plan A failed, the IM operatives carried out Plan B – to plant bombs near the rally venue. Ansari told investigators that they (IM men) reached close to the dais from where Modi and other BJP leaders delivered their speeches.

Ansari told investigators that the person who planted the bomb near the dais, which was said to be “our mother bomb”, failed to implement the plan correctly. “Maybe he panicked and did not fix the timer properly,” he said.

Hindu religious places on IM's radar

The NIA has claimed to have found evidence of an IM hand in the Bodh Gaya blasts and has warned that more religious places are on the radar of the terror outfit. Modules in various states were being activated to target Hindu religious places, NIA sources told rediff.com. The agency has confirmed this after the recent arrests in the Patna blasts case.

The IM currently has a strength of around 80 members, most of them from Darbhanga. The plan is to divide themselves into smaller groups and target religious places. “We are working on the leads to bust this lethal plan,” an NIA officer said.

Meanwhile, the NIA continues to question IM operative Shamsher Ansari for his role in the Patna blasts. The Bihar police had earlier questioned this 32-year-old from Ramgarh but let him off. Ansari, who was picked up on Wednesday by the investigators, has not been arrested formally.



Image: Gujarat CM Narendra Modi and BJP President Rajnath Singh at Gandhi Maidan in Patna