Court sends Akshardham attack accused to 3-day police remand

A man arrested for alleged involvement in the 2002 terror attack on the Akshardham temple in Gujarat was Tuesday produced before a city court which sent him to police custody till November 30.

Mohammed Farooq Shaikh was arrested Monday by Ahmedabad Crime Branch officials from the airport here on his arrival from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The Crime Branch had sought a 14-day remand of the 47-year-old accused on grounds that it wanted to interrogate him to know about the involvement of members of terrorist organisations in the attack that had left 34 people dead and 86 others injured.

However, Principal Sessions Judge M K Dave, before whom Shaikh was produced, sent him to police remand for only three days.

In its remand application, the Crime Branch said it wanted to know from the accused who all from Pakistan-based terror outfits Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba were involved in the attack and if he was in touch with them.

Police have said the accused was part of the conspiracy to carry out the attack on the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar.

He was involved in collecting funds for the operation with the help of the two banned terror outfits, a police official had said after his arrest.

Shaikh had been living in Riyadh since 1994 and hatched the conspiracy with others to target the temple to avenge the killing of minority community members in the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat, he had said.

On September 24, 2002, two armed terrorists had stormed the Akshardham temple complex in the state capital and opened fire on devotees.

The assault had taken place seven months after Gujarat was rocked by widespread communal violence triggered by the torching of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station.

The attackers were subsequently killed by National Security Guard (NSG) commandos.

The Supreme Court had, in May 2014, acquitted all the six convicts in the Akshardham case, including three who were awarded the death sentence by a trial court, for want of sufficient evidence against them.