Saudi Arabia is reported to have arrested Maulana Rila, the brother-in-law of Islamic State inspired Shangri-La hotel bomber Zahran Hashim, as well as colleague of his known only as Shahnawaj, last week.
This is on the basis of input from Indian intelligence, the Hindustan Times reported.
Hashim was the leader of National Towheed Jamaat and chief radicaliser of the hard-line Salafi group responsible for the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka.
India is believed to have provided several warnings on the attacks, including time and location specific details, which were ignored by Sri Lanka. Officers in Indian security agencies say they are already in touch with their Saudi Arabian counterparts to discover any links between the IS cadres responsible for the Sri Lanka attacks and Kasargode (Kerala) -Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu) module in India, with Colombo on the verge of sending a team to Saudi Arabia.
After the Easter Sunday bombings, Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale is believed to have called up the top-brass of the Tata owned Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL), to ask them to install security scanners and metal detectors at their three properties in Sri Lanka because all the suicide bombers are still not accounted for.
The IHCL owned Taj Samudra had a lucky escape on April 21 as UK educated suicide bomber Abdul Latif Mohammed Jamil entered the hotel but could not trigger the device.
He later died in a blast at the Tropical Inn in the suburb of Dehiwala that also took the lives of two other people. For the record, Indian intelligence alerted the Sri Lankan police and security agencies on April 4, 10, 16 (the day the device was tested in a motorcycle), 20 and two hours before the multiple suicide bombings on April 21, the last with the names of three churches under imminent bombing threat. The IS inspired bombings in Sri Lanka have raised serious concerns over spread of this Islamic group in India through the virtual space as the rabid group hardly holds any territory in Syria or Iraq.
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