Karnataka Police has arrested two persons in connection with a case of graffiti hailing militant groups surfacing in the Mangaluru port city of the south Indian state, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.
Quoting Mangaluru City Police Commissioner Vikash Kumar Vikash, the report said cases have been registered at Mangaluru East and Mangaluru North police stations.
“A special team was formed to detect the case, which after extensive searches and through technical intelligence traced and nabbed the two accused,” Kumar said.
The accused have been identified as Mohammed Shariq, 22, who runs a wholesale cloth business outlet at Tirthahalli, and Mazz Muneer Ahmed, 21, a third-year B.Tech student — both residents of Shivamogga district of the state.
They are being interrogated to identify whether others were involved in the crime.
The first graffiti came up on November 26, the twelfth anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attacks and mentioned Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Taliban. It was scrawled on the wall of a housing apartment in the city’s Kadri area facing the main road.
Three days later, another such graffiti was spotted in the city which made references to “someone offending the Prophet.” It was found on the wall of an old police outpost along Court Road.
The police had suspected local sympathisers of the two outfits to be behind it.