The Pune Police on Wednesday alleged that they have strong evidence that the five human rights activists and writers arrested from across the country the previous day have links to the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist).

“The evidence also involves other details with respect to the responsibilities given to these urban Naxals,” Firstpost quoted a police spokesperson as saying. “Some of the evidence collected reveal that there is a nexus with other unlawful organisations. They were even thinking of targeting higher political functionaries.”

The police said they had seized laptops, phones, memory cards and several other documents during the raids. These clearly point to their links to a conspiracy, the police spokesperson added.

The police’s statement came minutes after the Supreme Court stayed the transit remand of the activists and ordered that they would be under house arrest till the next hearing on September 6.

On Tuesday morning, teams of Pune Police raided the homes of several activists in Mumbai, Ranchi, Hyderabad, Delhi, Faridabad and Goa in connection with investigations into a public meeting organised before caste-related violence erupted at Bhima Koregaon near Pune on January 1. Later in the day they confirmed the arrests of Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira in Mumbai, Gautam Navlakha in New Delhi, Sudha Bharadwaj in Faridabad, Varavara Rao in Hyderabad.