New Delhi   

`That's my job', slain militant told his bosses

Devesh K. Pandey

NEW DELHI: "I would personally go to India for this job". This is what Ghulam Yazdani, who along with a Bangladeshi Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami (HuJI) militant was killed in an encounter with the Special Cell of the Delhi police this past Wednesday, conveyed to his Pakistan-based handlers about a month back.

Though the security agencies are not yet sure on what assignment he was here, his message itself makes it amply clear that it was a big operation.

Living in Bangladesh for the past over three years, police sources said the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) chief had been entrusted with the task of furthering the cause of "jehad" in the "Deccan" province of southern India. However, according to his handlers, Yazdani had not been doing anything "significant" lately despite being paid huge sums of money.

Back in India, Yazdani had a wide network of sympathisers and "jehadis" developed by him and his associates like Mufti Sufian Pantyangia and Rasool Khan, residents of Ahmedabad, and Abdul Rouf of Hyderabad. Apart from arranging arms and explosives like the deadly PETN from Pakistan, his job was also to expand the LeT network in Bangladesh.

He soon impressed HuJI militants and built a good understanding with them. So much so that the HuJI chief Mufti Hannan's right-hand Ahsan Ullah Hasan, who was also killed in the Wednesday's encounter, had been living with him for the past two years back in Bangladesh. After Hannan's arrest last year, several HuJI militants joined Yazdani.

The Special Cell got smell of terrorist activities en-route Bangladesh while probing the Ayodhya attack case last year. The police arrested Abdul Baqi, a conduit of the Jaish-e-Mohammad module based in Dhaka, who revealed that he had brought over a dozen militants from Bangladesh to carry out the attack. .

The revelations made by the duo led the Special Cell to vigorously follow the activities of militants operating from Bangladesh.

In December last, the Special Cell unearthed the entire conspiracy behind the blast at the Special Task Force office in Hyderabad in October last carried out at Yazdani's instance.

A month later, two alleged Bangladeshi HuJI militants, Said-Ul and Sohed-Ul, were arrested, but the most important catch was that of the LeT men Anishul Murshlin and Muhibbul Muttakin, from Faridpur in Bangladesh, through whom the Special Cell zeroed in on Yazdani, who was here to "prove" his commitment to "jehad".

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