Bengaluru blast: As we are Bhatkalis, our sons have been framed, say parents of one of the three arrested

Bengaluru: The parents of one of the three arrested on Thursday in connection with the December 28 Church Street blast have disputed claims made by the police regarding their son’s involvement in the terror attack.

Syed Ismail Afaque’s father Syed Abdul Aleem, 73, and mother Nurunissa, 63, told Deccan Chronicle that on Thursday morning their two sons Afaque and Abdul Azeez and Nurunissa’s sister’s son Abdus Subur had gone to Jayanagar for a health camp as Afaque was a homeopathy doctor.

Subur was doing his MBA in Bhatkal and had come to the city on Thursday for his project work, Nurunissa added. They claimed that they came to know about the arrest of Afaque and Subur only through media reports.

‘No links with Saddam’
Afaque’s parents claimed that they don’t know who Saddam Hussain is. “We have no Saddam Hussain in our entire family, nor do we know anybody by that name in Bhatkal,” said Afaque’s father.

“The police had come to our flat around 2.15 p.m. on Thursday and randomly searched our house. They seized a laptop, which was being used by Afaque’s daughter Sukaina, and a couple of damaged phones that were lying in the house, along with an internet cable,” said Aleem.

The ‘incriminating’ communication equipment that the police claimed to have recovered from our Cox Town flat was a Cisco router, he added.

“As we are Bhatkalis, our sons have been framed. We have been living in the city for the last seven years and have so far stayed in four different houses - in R.T. Nagar, Basavanagudi, Frazer Town and Cox Town. We came from Bhatkal for our children’s education. While four of them are engineers, two are advocates and one is a doctor, Aleem said.