A Bengaluru special court has accepted the guilty plea of Mohammed Shariq, the key accused in the 2022 Mangaluru cooker blast.
Shariq, 27, who hails from Shivamogga, admitted to the charges nearly three years after the explosion inside an autorickshaw on November 19, 2022. He initially pleaded not guilty when the court framed charges on April 20, 2024, but reversed his stand in December 2025 by submitting a fresh plea under Section 229 (Conviction on plea of guilty) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC).
The court accepted this application on March 26 and scheduled a fresh hearing to record the plea.
In its order, the court stated: “The application filed by accused No.1… under Section 229 of the CrPC., is hereby allowed… It is necessary to record the plea of accused No.1 again by reading over the charges already framed on 20.04.2024.”
Shariq suffered severe burns when the pressure cooker bomb he was allegedly transporting to be planted in Mangaluru detonated prematurely on his lap due to a faulty timer setting. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested him soon after he was discharged from a Mangaluru hospital.
According to the NIA, Shariq is part of an Islamic State-inspired Shivamogga module connected to multiple terror-linked incidents since 2020. At the time of the blast, he was already wanted in a September 2022 Shivamogga case involving IED testing by the same module. He was earlier arrested in 2020 for writing anti-national graffiti in Mangaluru.
The module is also accused in the March 1, 2024 Rameshwaram Cafe blast in Bengaluru, where investigators believe an IED similar to the one allegedly carried by Shariq was planted by founding member Mussavir Hussain, along with the now-arrested Abdul Matheen Taha.