Thiruvananthapuram: The investigation into the Kozhikode train arson case has revealed that accused Shahrukh Saifi had received a phone call to his mobile phone from Kerala two days after the attack.
This comes even as the investigation agencies nearly concluded that he received assistance both from within and outside the state in carrying out the attack on the Kannur-Kozhikode Executive Express on the night of April 2, in which three persons died and nine others were injured.
The probe team is also baffled as to who pulled the chain of the train in which the accused escaped after committing the horrific crime when it reached Maharashtra.
It was on the second day after the arson attack that a call from Palakkad was made to the phone of the accused. At that time, the Cyber wing was monitoring the accused’s phone at the direction of the Special Investigation Team (SIT). The cops dug out the location of the person who made the phone call on the same night itself and took a youth into custody from Palakkad.
However, the youth in his statement claimed that he simply dialed the number written on the pages of a diary inside a bag that was recovered from the crime spot, after the same was flashed through media channels. The cops, though, weren’t ready to buy the theory and made a detailed inquiry into the antecedents and background of the youth. However, they could find nothing suspicious.
The accused Saifi escaped from Kannur in the Ernakulam-Ajmer Marusagar Express soon after the attack. Someone pulled a chain as soon as the train entered Maharashtra, the investigation team found. The train resumed its journey, and the accused jumped out of the train at Kalambani, after a further one-and-a-half hours' travel.
The Kerala Police suspect somebody might have pulled the chain to facilitate the escape of the accused. This angle got strengthened after the railway police informed them that a Rajasthan native, who boarded the train from Kochi, was the one who pulled the chain.
A team immediately flew to Rajasthan and took the youth into custody and subjected him to detailed questioning.
On the night of April 2, an unidentified man barged into D-1 compartment of the Executive Express around 9.17 pm, carrying petrol in a bottle in a bag. He poured the fuel on the passengers without any provocation and lit fire when the train reached Korapuzha bridge near Elathur. Nine people suffered burn injuries, while the bodies of a woman, an infant, and a man were recovered later from the tracks near Elathur.
Police believe they fell off the train or jumped off it, seeing the fire. The accused absconded from the spot and was later arrested by the Maharashtra ATS from Ratnagiri two days later.
