Police arrest suspect in Delhi High Court blast case

Indian police arrested a man in Kolkata who they suspect may have planted a bomb that killed 13 people outside the Delhi High Court last Wednesday, the Times of India reports.

The paper said the authorities arrested a man in his late thirties from a hospital in Bagnan, West Bengal, on Tuesday. The TOI cites local police as saying that the man, who identified himself as Syed Afjal Taher, resembles the sketch of one of the suspects distributed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), and he was admitted to hospital with injuries on his head, face and limbs that police said were similar to blast wounds. 

Local authorities have sent pictures of Taher to the NIA, the paper said. He was produced before the Howrah court and was sent to judicial custody for treatment.

According to TOI, medical staff grew suspicious when Taher was hesitant about disclosing his identity and address, the paper said. Doctors informed the police, who interrogated Taher on Monday evening. Taher, the cops said, kept changing his statement. "He was posing as mentally deranged and changed his statement every five minutes," the paper quotes an unnamed investigator as saying.  

The paper said that Taher's mother tongue is Urdu, but he is fluent in Hindi, Nepali and English. He is from Nepal's Banke district, which shares a border with Uttar Pradesh. He didn't have any documents or luggage when he arrived at the hospital. Police suspect he was injured in the Delhi blast. A probe is on to find out how he landed up at Bagnan.

Earlier, the NIA arrested another person from the outskirts Kolkata for sending the second and fourth emails claiming responsibility for last week's Delhi high court blast. The arrest was made after his cell phone was traced as the sender device of the emails.