The police in Tamil Nadu claimed to have arrested a Sri Lankan national who was staying in the outskirts of Chennai without valid documents.
Acting on a tip-off, the police on Tuesday searched an apartment and arrested the Sri Lankan national, who has been identified as Roshan. According to a report in The New Indian Express, a special team comprising of the Intelligence Bureau, as well as officials from the NIA, conducted raids at an apartment located at Parivakkam junction on the Chennai-Bengaluru National Highway in Poonamallee. The report adds that three men, three women and a child were found residing at the apartment and the three men were detained by the officials.
Quoting sources, TNIE reports that all the three men were friends with Hashim, a radical Tamil-speaking cleric who has been identified as the mastermind of the Easter Sunday Sri Lanka blasts, on Facebook.
Roshan did not have proper travel documents, like passport and visa, and had entered India several months ago. He was reportedly staying with some other Sri Lankan nationals who had valid papers.
The police are probing whether Roshan is in any way connected with the Easter Sunday bombing in Colombo that killed over 250 people and injured over 500 people.
On Monday, the NIA arrested 29-year-old Riyas Aboobacker, a resident of Palakkad in Kerala, on charges of conspiring to carry out terror attacks in the state. According to NIA, Riyas was planning to carry out terror attacks in various tourist attraction sites in the state such as Kochi. During his interrogation, Riyas told the agency that he had been following Hashim for over a year and has also followed the speeches of Zakir Naik, an absconding Indian Islamic preacher and founder of the Islamic Research Foundation. He was on Tuesday remanded to 30 days custody by the NIA court in Kochi.
(With inputs from IANS)
