Police at a blast site in Ahmedabad

Bhopal/Ahmedabad, Nov. 10: Qayamuddin Kapadia, an explosives expert from Vadodara and alleged plotter of the Ahmedabad and Delhi blasts, has been arrested from Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh police said today.

“Qayamuddin alias Musa alias Rizwan was caught on Sunday night on a tip-off at a time he was planning to leave Ujjain. He was waiting for his accomplices on the Ujjain-Badnagar road,” deputy inspector-general Pawan Srivastava told reporters.

Srivastava added that “objectionable literature” was seized from the suspect. He has been remanded in police custody for 15 days.

Qayamuddin had allegedly attended terror training camps in the jungles of Wagamon in Kerala and Halol near Vadodara and taught recruits how to set off blasts.

He and Abdul Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqeer — a software engineer and blast suspect who is on the run — had stayed in the Vatva area of Ahmedabad for some time earlier this year, police sources said. From that hideout, they had allegedly plotted the 17 blasts that killed 59 people in Ahmedabad on July 26.

Qayamuddin had played a lead role in buying bicycles and planting them with bombs in Ahmedabad, and in the planting of explosives across Surat, the sources said.

A graphic artist who sold rubber stamps, Qayamuddin had been a member of the banned Students’ Islamic Movement of India (Simi) and was close to the outfit’s arrested chief, Safdar Nagori, an officer said. He later allegedly joined the Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad and Delhi blasts.

Delhi police had claimed that Nagori and Tauqeer headed the Simi arm of the Indian Mujahideen while Mohammed Atif, killed in the Jamianagar “encounter”, led its non-Simi arm.

A Gujarat police team will shortly take Qayamuddin to the western state, said Ashish Bhatia, Ahmedabad joint commissioner of police.

The sources said Qayamuddin had emerged as a strong link between the Ahmedabad and Delhi blasts. “Gujarat police had been tracking him in Delhi two days before the September 13 blasts. There is evidence that he was in Delhi at the time of the blasts along with four other suspects,” an officer said.