A 35-year-old man who is suspected of having been involved in the grenade attack at the Thakur Dwara temple in Amritsar was arrested in Bihar. Sharanjit Kumar alias Sunny, a resident of Bhaini Bangar village in Batala police station in Gurdaspur, Punjab, was arrested on Friday evening at a roadside food stall on National Highway number-19 (GT Road) in Gaya district.
The incident occurred in the early morning of March 15, when the attackers on two motorcycles wearing masks threw a grenade at the temple on Sher Shah Suri Road in the Khandwala region of Amritsar. Though there were no casualties, the blast severely damaged the area, breaking windows and destroying the walls of the temples, and causing panic among the natives. An incident that followed led to the registration of a case under the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, the Explosive Substances Act, and other related laws.
National Investigation Agency (NIA) showed that Sharanjit Kumar was actively involved in the conspiracy and execution of the terror plan. The NIA further confessed that foreign-based handlers in Europe, the United States, and Canada aided the planning of the attack by facilitating logistics, funds, information about the targets, and even provided terrifying hardware equipment to their Indian partners.
Inquiries also revealed that another accused in Batala had sent off a consignment of four grenades to Sharanjit on March 1. Sharanjit had only delivered one of these grenades to the attackers, Gursidak Singh and Vishal Gill, who executed the temple bombing on the orders of their foreign handlers, only two days before the attack.
The arrest is a critical breakthrough in the case, as the police agencies are still unravelling the larger terrorist web of operatives and handlers involved in cross-border terror plots against India.
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