MUMBAI: Investigators have found that Rahil Abdul Rehman Sheikh, a Mumbai resident thought to have commanded the Lashkar cell which executed the July 11 serial bombings here, may have developed his complex transnational terror networks after a visit to Jammu and Kashmir in 2003.

Evidence of Sheikh's Jammu and Kashmir links has emerged from a reappraisal of the interrogation records of Feroze Abdul Latif Ghaswala, a Mumbai-based automobile mechanic arrested by the Delhi police in May. Ghaswala, along with Pakistani national Mohammad Iqbal and Ahmedabad-based computer engineer Mohammad Ali Chippa, was part of a Lashkar cell that hoped to carry out large-scale bombings in Gujarat.

Ghaswala's journey into the Lashkar began in 2002, after the communal pogrom in Gujarat. Enveloped by the violence, which began while he was visiting his aunt in Ahmedabad, Ghaswala witnessed large-scale anti-Muslim terror — and, he later told his interrogators, the mass burial of 40 victims. As a result, the automobile mechanic decided to join the Islamist jihad against India.

Despite his efforts to tap Islamist networks in Gujarat, Ghaswala was unable to make contact with the Lashkar till late 2003. In September that year, Ghaswala made contact with Sheikh on the fringes of a conference organised by the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis, an ultra-conservative sect. Sheikh himself is thought to have been in Srinagar using the conference as a cover to meet with top Jammu and Kashmir-based terrorists.

Transnational networks

If investigators are right, the genesis of the Mumbai Lashkar network might well lie in the 2003 conference. Addressed by a well-known preacher, Zakir Sheikh, the Ahl-e-Hadis conference had no political agenda. Sheikh is reported to have often visited friends at Zakir Sheikh's Islamic Research Foundation in Mumbai, but there is no suggestion that the preacher had any knowledge of these Lashkar-linked activities.

Chittagong camp

Sheikh later arranged for Ghaswala's training at a Harkat ul-Jihad Islamic camp near Chittagong, under the tutelage of Mufti Abdul Hannan — a Peshawar-trained HuJI commander responsible for a 2002 assassination attempt on the then Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as well as the 2005 serial bombings that rocked the country.

Then, in June 2005, Sheikh travelled for training at a Lashkar-run facility in Pakistan.

Over time, Sheikh arranged for the training of dozens of other Mumbai men, including key figures in the cell believed to have provided infrastructure support to the actual bombers.

They include Faisal Sheikh, a Mumbai businessman who, police say, used his commercial operations to launder Lashkar funds from West Asia. Faisal Sheikh's brother, Bangalore-based computer engineer Muzammil Sheikh, also allegedly trained in Pakistan.

Training under Lashkar commander

In almost each case, Sheikh's operatives flew to Teheran using legitimate travel documents before being escorted by Lashkar operatives across the largely un-policed Iran-Pakistan border into Balochistan and from there to the Bahawalpur area of Pakistan's Punjab province.

Several of the recruits trained under the personal supervision of the Lashkar's long-standing commander for operations targeting India, Azam Cheema.

On the basis of the evidence available so far, Sheikh — who, along with his core associates Zabiuddin Ansari and Zulfikar Fayyaz `Kagazi,' escaped police sweeps after the recovery of a large cache of explosives at Aurangabad in May — ran these cells under the overall supervision of a Pakistani national identified only by a code-name, `Junaid.' `Junaid' met with key Mumbai Lashkar operatives in Dhaka and Kathmandu.

Working of cells

However, members of one cell had little knowledge of the workings of the other — one reason why interrogation of members of the infrastructure cell has yielded so little on the perpetrators themselves.

Sources close to the investigation, however, said they expected to have a clearer picture soon of just how the bombings were carried out, and by whom, as leads harvested during the ongoing interrogations matured.

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