NALGONDA: Mohammad Raji-Ur Rehman alias Abdul Rehman, suspected chief of the Lashkar-e-Toiba's violent operations in South India, has told police that he, along with some likeminded people, launched a trust in Chennai to "spread religious ideology". According to reliable sources, they named it Al-Fatah and he has been sending Islamic literature to the persons responsible in Chennai from Saudi Arabia on a regular basis. (Al-Fatah, in fact, was an exile Palestinian group that was founded by Yasser Arafat in 1957. It was committed to attaining full independence for Palestinians).

Donations

Rehman is said to have told the interrogators that his friends residing in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka gave donations to run the trust. He purportedly met these people in Saudi Arabia where he has been living for the past 12 years. Inputs collected from his friends suggest that Rehman is a "hardcore religious man".

Police found that he had a valid visa to visit Bangladesh, the sources said. He reportedly told the investigators that he wanted to go to the country to meet a friend there, but did not, owing to personal reasons. The police recovered his passport, mobile phone chip and three books from his house in BTS colony here, it is learnt. Local police are tightlipped on the issue.

However, Rehman's brother, Habib, finds fault with the police. "The local police searched my brother's house, grilled us for about six hours on December 30 and tendered their apologies the next day for troubling us. They said that it was a case of mistaken identity. But, the very next day, a police team picked him up without informing us," he says.

Meanwhile, the police department is in an embarrassing situation with the revelation that Rehman's father was the senior assistant in the district police office. The prime accused in the former Gujarat Minister Haren Pandya's murder case, Md.Asghar Ali alias Junaid's father was also with the police department.

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