‘Lone wolf’ attack: Accused sent to judicial custody | Mumbai News
3 min readMumbaiMay 11, 2026 09:48 PM IST
A Thane special court has sent a 31-year-old man, arrested for allegedly carrying out a ‘lone wolf’ attack in Mira Road last month, to judicial custody for two weeks, after the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) did not seek his further custody for now.
The state agency said it will seek his custody if required later in the probe. On April 27, Zaib Ansari was arrested for attempting to murder two on-duty security guards at an under-construction building in Mira Road, after asking them their religion. The ATS claims that a search of his home after his arrest led them to a chit mentioning an oath of allegiance to the terrorist outfit ISIS.
The ATS which took over the probe from the local police had last week invoked anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), against Ansari, seeking to probe possible terror links.
Ansari’s lawyer, Wahab Khan, had last week claimed before the court that the accused suffers from schizophrenia and was previously on medication. On Monday, Khan told the court that Ansari’s medical assessment should be done. The court said that it will call for a report from the jail authorities seeking preliminary assessment by the medical experts in jail.
Khan also told the court that Ansari, who moved from the US in 2019, has peculiar dietary habits, requesting that the jail authorites take care of it while he is in judicial custody. The lawyer told the court that Ansari only eats vegetarian food, that he prepares and never eats outside food. Khan told the court that the accused also does not even eat at a relative’s home or family gathering, preferring to instead it bananas and dates.
On Monday, the prosecutor, Sanjay More, told court that ATS does not need his custody for now. Last week, the ATS had sought Ansari’s custody for a week stating that the investigators want to confront him with the mirror image of his phone received from a forensic laboratory, which he had allegedy wiped before his arrest. The ATS also told the court it wants to probe whether he had ‘radicalised’ any person as he was teaching online classes for students based in the UAE for science and maths subjects. The ATS claimed that a note found at his home mentioned “lone wolves will pounce on you” and a sentence in Arabic, claiming that ‘you mushrikeen will see real jihad in Bilal Hind (referred to as India) from now’, the ATS had told court.
