Bhubaneswar / Hyderabad: In a joint operation by Odisha and Telangana police, Central Intelligence Bureau and Special Operation Group, four absconding Simi operatives were arrested from Odisha’s steel city Rourkela on Tuesday night.
The four had escaped from Khandwa Jail in Madhya Pradesh in 2013 and had been allegedly involved in a series of terror activities in several states since then.
The terror operatives were captured after three hours of intense exchange of fire at the Kuresi Mohalla area.
The mother of one of the operatives was also arrested. A huge cache of arms and ammunitions, including three pistols, seven guns and 11 rounds of live cartridges, were seized from the militants.
Simi men had struck in Telangana
The Simi activists were identified as Mehboob alias Guddu, 27, Amzad Khan alias Dowd, 27, Zakir Khan alias Sadik, 32, Mahammed Salik alias Sallu, 32 and Nazma, mother of Mehboob, of Khandawa district in Madhya Pradesh.
Odisha Intelligence Bureau director-general Arun Sarangi confirmed that the suspects belonged to the Simi and had been on the run since 2013.
The four suspects had allegedly looted Rs 46 lakh from the SBI branch at Choppadandi in Karim-nagar district on February 1, 2014.
The gang is also suspected to have failed in an attempt to rob a Muthoot Finance building at Ramachandrapuram.
Two other Simi operatives, Mohammed Aija-zuddeen and Mohammed Aslam alias Bilal, of MP, who were suspected to be part of this gang, were shot dead by the TS police in Janakipuram in Nalgonda on April 4, 2015, after they killed two police officers at Suryapet.
While in hiding, the Simi men were allegedly involved in terror activities in MP, AP, Karna-taka, Tamil Nadu, Utta-rakhand and UP.
The terror activities included a blast in a Bengaluru-Guwahati train at Chennai, that killed a software engineer on May 1, 2014, and an explosion near Faras-khana and Vishrambag police stations in Pune on July 10, 2014.
They were allegedly involved in train dacoity cases and another bank robbery in Odisha’s Sundargarh district. They were also allegedly involved in an explosion in Roorkee in Uttarakhand, in which a 12-year-old boy was killed. In Bijnore in UP, an explosion took place when they were mixing chemicals.
TS officials said they would bring the operatives to Karimnagar on a prisoner’s transit warrant to investigate the cases here.
