Word: hanif
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...Last week, police raided Chimatpada, a maze of slum houses, cheap restaurants and noisy industrial workshops, bursting into the pink-walled shanty where the Hanifs lived. Inside, says chief investigator Rakesh Maria, they found 22 detonators, 235 gelatin sticks, 14 timing devices, wires and soldering equipment. As the authorities tell it, the Hanifs collaborated with a 26-year-old embroiderer, Arshat Ansari, to pull off the Aug. 25 bombings that killed 52 and injured 175 in Bombay. While Ansari allegedly placed his bomb in a taxi at Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded jewelry market, police say the Hanifs had packed explosives...
...This family outing was meticulously planned. Police say Hanif, Fahmida and Farheen had even made a trial run in the same taxi the previous day, with Ansari. They overlooked just one detail: while Ansari's driver was blown up along with his taxi at Zaveri Bazaar, the Hanifs' cabbie stepped out of his cab for a bite and so lived to provide the police with a sketch of a family that an informant would later identify as the Hanifs...
...Police say the Hanifs and Ansari have confessed. In custody, says Maria, Hanif and Ansari have admitted that they belong to the Gujarat Muslim Revenge Force, a previously unknown group dedicated to avenging last year's massacres of Muslims by Hindu mobs in the western state of Gujarat. In addition to the most recent blasts, police say the Hanifs and Ansari have also been charged with?and confessed to?planting a bomb on a bus in the Bombay suburb of Ghatkopar on July 28, which killed three and injured 42, and to planting another bus bomb that failed to explode...
...first, some officials suspected the outlawed Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which has carried out similar bombings in the past. The authorities say they have yet to find any links between SIMI, the Hanifs and Ansari, but, says Bombay's joint Commissioner of Police Satya Pal Singh, "we suspect they might exist." The police also see the hidden hand of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant Islamic group committed to ending Indian rule in Kashmir. Police believe Hanif was recruited by Lashkar while working as an electrician at a hotel in Dubai and returned to Chimatpada...
...Outwardly at least, Hanif did not seem dangerous. Neighbors saw him as a quiet, religious, hardworking man, who left home every morning at daybreak and returned late. In Chimatpada, where Hanif's auto-rickshaw sits covered in blue tarpaulin, there is now a sense of shock and bewilderment over the arrests. "We simply can't believe it," says Amir Jaha, who lives two blocks from the Hanifs. "They were just like...