A two-member police team from Delhi has arrived in Tirunelveli to begin their second round of investigations in connection with the e-mail bomb threat to Parliament, police said.

During the initial probe, 25 hard disks were seized from the two Internet browsing centres at Palayamkottai in Tirunelveli from where the message was sent, police said adding, the disks were taken to Delhi.

The team, which includes a sub-inspector, arrived Friday night.

• Parliament bomb threat: Two students interrogated

Various Muslim outfits are now under the investigation team's scanner and it is in the process of identifying the culprits using computer images, according to sources.

Meanwhile, police, monitoring movement of leaders of various militant outfits, said some outfits posing as social service organisations had links with militants abroad.

An Intelligence Bureau official said there were about 25,000 militant elements/sympathisers in Tamil Nadu and they were in the process of regrouping. In fact one group had even threatened a top Tamil Nadu police official with dire
consequences, if "innocent" Muslims were not released from jail, and that the "murder of Imam Ali (an extremist killed in an encounter with police) would be avenged".

This group (whose name was not mentioned by the official) had murdered a Hindu Munnani leader in Madurai a few months ago. Then a temple priest was murdered, he said.

Police said the militant groups, which had triggered the serial bomb blasts at Coimbatore, and an explosion at the Madurai Meenakshi Amman temple, were now resorting to murdering individual Hindu leaders or issuing threats like the e-mail bomb threat. 

Some associates of Imam Ali, who were nabbed while making bombs at Olaimalai, 35km from Madurai, were with The Muslim Defence Force.

Intelligence officials strongly suspect that MDF is an outfit having links with the Laskhar-e-Tayiba. MDF members were being given training in the handling of weapons and bombs.

The militants have also floated an organisation to convert people belonging the oppressed classes, and money for the same was sent through the hawala route, they said.

According to the sources, monitoring of the militant groups has started to yield good results, though the systematic indoctrination of youth on jihad was going on in several places including Coutralam, Tenkasi, and Melayapalayam.

The officials also feel that the e-mail could be just an empty threat, because the fundementalists in Tamil Nadu did not have the wherewithal like their counterparts in Kashmir.

"But we don't want to take chances, and after the e-mail threat, we have mounted pressure on the fundamentalists, and people also are cooperating with us to a great deal. In Melayapalayam area, Muslim and Hindus live in amity, but there are forces which are constantly enaged in creating rift," they said.