The house in West Bengal's Burdwan district where a blast occurred on October 2
In a major breakthrough, Sajid aka Sheikh Rehmatullah, the alleged mastermind of West Bengal's Burdwan terror module and a key member of a banned Bangladeshi terror outfit, was arrested by the state police on Saturday afternoon near the Kolkata airport.
A pan card and a voter ID card have been recovered from him.
Sajid was arrested by the Anti-Terror Squad of the Bidhannagar Police which had tracked a courier who was to deliver money to Sajid on Saturday afternoon on Jessore Road near the Kolkata airport .
Sajid is the first suspected Bangladeshi national to be arrested in the case. He is believed to be a central committee member of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangaldesh or JMB which is banned in that country. He is expected to be handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) shortly.
The NIA had announced a cash reward of Rs 10 lakh for any information leading to Sajid's arrest. According to the NIA, Sajid was living at Lalgola in Murshidabad district near a madrasa that NIA has now sealed.
With this arrest, the exact operations of the terror module is likely to emerge.
On October 2, a bomb had exploded in a house at Khagragarh in Bengal's Burdwan district in which two persons, Shakil Ahmed and Sovan Mandal, were killed.
Initially assumed to be a gas cylinder blast or explosion of crude bombs, investigations revealed Shakil Ahmed and Sovan Mandal were using fairly sophisticated improvised explosive devices or IEDs.
Interrogation of two women arrested from the blast site revealed that a network of terror was spread across several districts in Bengal.
In a house close to the blast site suspected to have been occupied by terrorists, the NIA recovered 39 IEDs eight days after the state police searched and sealed it.