NIA chargesheet says Red Fort blast was a suicide bombing inside an i20

The National Investigation Agency told a court this week that the 10 November 2025 blast outside Delhi's Red Fort was a suicide bombing. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor and assistant professor at Al Falah University in Faridabad, was inside a second-hand Hyundai i20 when he set off an improvised explosive device by a command trigger. DNA from biological material at the scene, the agency said, places him in the car. Fifteen people died on the agency's latest count in the chargesheet narrative; earlier official tallies stood at 11 dead and 29 injured. The document itself runs to about 7,500 pages.

Nabi, also known in the file as Pinda and Rahul Bhat, is described as operational head of a revived Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind module, an offshoot of Al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent. Investigators say he began rebuilding the dormant group in 2022, organised meetings in Delhi-NCR and Jammu and Kashmir, and treated the Red Fort as a "symbol of the Indian state." Handwritten notes seized from his rooms at the university, the chargesheet says, argued against electoral democracy and for the imposition of sharia. Twelve visits to the Red Fort precinct between December 2023 and May 2025 are listed as reconnaissance. The date of the attack was not fixed in advance. Nabi moved after a wave of arrests in Srinagar, the file says, and struck earlier than planned.

A second accused, Jasir Bilal Wani, used consumer tools to learn the bomb. The chargesheet says he watched YouTube clips on sugar-and-potassium-nitrate rockets, asked ChatGPT for construction steps, and ordered parts on Flipkart. Forensic work on post-blast debris found residues of TATP and ammonium nitrate. The module also followed an Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula booklet circulated as the "Lone Mujahid Pocket Book," which walks through explosives, surveillance and covert work. That detail is the part of the file that will travel. A doctor, a shopping site, a chatbot and a PDF were enough, on the agency's account, to turn a used hatchback into a vehicle-borne IED.

Weapons came through a different channel. Tufail Ahmad Bhat, described as a former overground worker for Lashkar-e-Taiba, is accused of buying an AK-47, a Krinkov rifle, a pistol, magazines and ammunition through dead drops and selling them to Nabi for Rs 3 lakh. A supplementary chargesheet earlier this year added Zameer Ahmad Ahanger, Tufail and Muzafar Ahmad, a paediatrician and alleged founding member of an AGuH interim cell, taking the number of people charged to 13 including Nabi. Muzafar remains absconding. Zameer and Tufail face charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

Al Falah University sits in Faridabad, across the Delhi border. Nabi taught there. That fact is why the case is not only a Kashmir file. The module, as written by NIA, used a professional campus in the National Capital Region as cover, a second-hand car market for the vehicle, and open internet services for the chemistry. None of those nodes required a border crossing on the day of the blast.

The legal claim the agency wants the court to accept is larger than murder. Because the target was chosen as a state symbol, the chargesheet argues the blast was also waging war against the state. That upgrade changes sentencing exposure and the political weight of the trial at Patiala House. Defence lawyers have not yet put their full reply on the public record. What is already public is the prosecution's chain: two years of planning, a last-minute date, a command detonation from inside the car, and a set of consumer purchases that look ordinary until they are listed in a chargesheet.

Red Fort remains a working monument and the stage for Independence Day. Tightening the perimeter is the visible response. The less visible one is the question the file poses to campuses, chemical suppliers and online marketplaces. A 7,500-page chargesheet is a claim that those systems were used in sequence and that the sequence was reconstructable after the fact. The trial will test whether the reconstruction holds. The dead already fix the cost of the gap that existed on 10 November.