The brazen incursion on Wednesday – which came on the anniversary of the 2001 Parliament attack – was made possible by an unlikely conspiracy.
New Delhi: The group responsible for a shocking breach of Parliament’s security wanted to create anarchy in the country and compel the government to meet their “illegal” demands, investigators told a Delhi court on Friday, as the probe’s focus shifted to the fifth accused, Lalit Jha, who was described as the brain behind the conspiracy.
Jha, who was sent to seven days in police custody, surrendered to the police before being arrested late on Thursday. Delhi Police’s Special Cell is now probing the role of two people allegedly associated with Jha – identified as brothers Kailash Kumawat, 27, and Mahesh Kumawat, 32, residents of Nagaur in Rajasthan.
Stay tuned with breaking news on HT Channel on Facebook.
The investigators submitted a remand application to additional sessions judge (ASJ) Hardeep Kaur, saying that Jha had allegedly confessed to his involvement in the case.
The remand application, according to people aware of the matter, disclosed that all the accused – four men and a woman – met a number of times and executed the conspiracy.
“Jha disclosed that they wanted to create anarchy in the country so that they can compel the government to meet their illegal demands,” said the application, according to the people quoted above.
Four other people accused of the crime – Sagar Sharma and Manoranjan D, who walked past three layers of security before rappelling down from the visitors’ gallery and spraying coloured smoke inside the Lok Sabha, and Amol Shinde and Neelam Singh, who were arrested while shouting slogans outside Parliament – were remanded to police custody for seven days on Thursday.
The brazen incursion on Wednesday – which came on the anniversary of the 2001 Parliament attack – was made possible by an unlikely conspiracy stitched together by an e-rickshaw driver in Lucknow, the son of wage labourers in Latur, a government job aspirant in Jind, an engineering graduate in Mysuru and a tutor from Kolkata.
The accused first started interacting as members of a Facebook page dedicated to freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and carried out the attack using visitor passes procured from Bharatiya Janata Party lawmaker Pratap Simha.
During his interrogation, Jha, 35, allegedly told police that he had destroyed all the five mobile phones the same day he fled, hours after the incursion in Parliament. “He claimed that he threw some and burnt some but it’s a claim we are verifying. He said he destroyed the phones to eliminate the possibility of evidence with respect to their chats and communication,” said an investigating officer, requesting anonymity.
The remand application said that Jha was suspected to have destroyed the mobile phones when he travelled to Jaipur in Rajasthan by bus and that he allegedly admitted to throwing his phone on his way back to Delhi.
The remand was asked for so as “to find the actual motive behind the attack and his association with enemy country and terrorist organisations,” said the application, adding the investigation had to be carried out to ascertain the financial transactions and funding behind the attack.
Police said that Jha fled from Parliament on Wednesday afternoon and allegedly went to Kashmere Gate bus terminus, from where he took a bus to Jaipur. “In Jaipur, he stayed a night in the hotel. In the morning, he went to the Kumawat residence in Nagaur,” the investigating officer quoted above said. Nagaur is about five hours from Jaipur by
