Delhi blast driver fled to Nuh from F'bad

No one seems to have noticed Dr Mohammad Umar Un-Nabi's quiet exit from the Al-Falah Medical College in Faridabad on October 30. Ten days later, Nabi became the focus of a nationwide investigation after it emerged that he was driving the Hyundai i20 that exploded on a busy arterial road near the Red Fort on the evening of November 10, killing at least Il people.

- Leena Dhankhar

Investigations have now revealed that the doctor, part of an alleged white-collar terror network that included several doctors, was staying in a bare, rented room, in a house in Haryana's Nuh, 82 kilometres from Delhi, till the day before the blast. Senior investigators from the National Investigation Agency, which is in charge of the investigation, and the Jammu and Kashmir Police, which started the probe that led to the alleged terror module, are now examining digital and financial trails for links between Nabi's last days in Nuh to the procurement of explosives and the network.

Nabi left the medical college, police said, after Dr Muzammil Shakeel Ganaie, Umar's close associate and colleague at Al-Falah, was nabbed from Faridabad. A series of arrests after anti-India posters surfaced in Nowgam, Srinagar, had led police to Ganaie. Subsequent raids also led to the seizure of large quantities of ammonium nitrate that could be used to build a bomb.

On October 30, Nabi was not on the investigators' radar, an officer privy to the investigation, said. CCTV footage from the day before showed Nabi at a pollution centre with the recently acquired, secondhand, i20 car. Another recording shows him getting a mobile phone repaired. But the arrest of his friend Ganaie -- they both hail for Koil village in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir -- seems to have spooked Nabi.