The National Investigation Agency on Sunday said it arrested an alleged aide of Umar Nabi, the doctor who was believed to have been driving the car that exploded near Delhi’s Red Fort metro station on November 10.

The agency described the arrest, the first one in the case, as a “major breakthrough”.

The NIA identified the man as Amir Rashid Ali, a resident of the Pampore town in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district. It alleged that he visited Delhi to facilitate the purchase of the Hyundai i20 car that was “eventually used as a “vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device”.

The car was registered in Ali’s name, the National Investigation Agency said.

Ali had earlier been arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and was in their custody since the day of the blast.

The blast near the Red Fort metro station left 13 persons dead. Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

The NIA on Sunday said it has forensically established that Nabi, an assistant professor of medicine at Al-Falah University in Haryana’s Faridabad, was driving the car that exploded. It added that it has also seized another vehicle belonging to him, and is examining it for evidence.

Reports have claimed that Nabi was a key figure in a terror network spanning Kashmir, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Hours before the blast, the police said that it had cracked an “inter-state and transnational terror module” in Faridabad and Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur. Two doctors from Kashmir – Adeel Ahmad Rather and Muzamil Shakeel – are among those arrested in the alleged case.

The police said at the time that it had recovered 2,900 kg of improvised explosive device-making material in raids in several states.

In the backdrop of the blast and the terror module case, the Jammu and Kashmir Police on Wednesday conducted raids at more than 300 locations in the Kashmir valley allegedly linked to persons affiliated with the banned Jamaat-e-Islami.

The actions came after intelligence that elements linked to the Jamaat-e-Islami, banned under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, were trying to revive the organisation under different names, the police said.

The authorities in Jammu and Kashmir have not officially linked the terror module and blast cases with the ongoing raids.

On November 14, security forces in the Union Territory demolished Nabi’s home in the Pulwama district.

There are no provisions in Indian law that allow for the demolition of property as a punitive measure.

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