BANGALORE: Another cache of arms and ammunition was seized on Saturday from the Hospet residence of Imran Jalal, a suspected terrorist, who was arrested by the police on Friday. A police team from Bangalore escorted Imran to his rented house in Hospet in Bellary district and seized an AK-56 assault rifle, 200 live rounds of ammunition, five hand grenades and two magazines of AK-56, the Commissioner of Police Neelam Achuta Rao told presspersons here.

Native of Hazratbal

Mr. Rao said Imran, a native of Hazratbal in Srinagar, had met top insurgents with Lashkar-e-Taiba links in Pakistan during 2005. They gave him a satellite phone and sent him to Bangalore to survey the security arrangements at the airport and the facilities of IT majors Infosys and Wipro, instructions that the police believe he carried out.

The arms and ammunition seized from Imran on his arrest on Friday and from his residence on Saturday were part of a consignment he had received from a person named Rajesh in Pune in November 2006, he said.

According to the Commissioner, Imran's association with militant outfits dates back to 1990, when he joined the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and underwent arms training in Muzaffarbad in PoK.

Imran came to Bangalore in 1991 where he joined a diploma course in computer science in a private polytechnic. After completing the course, he returned to Kashmir and worked as a supervisor in a cigarette distributor's office. In 2002, he came to Hampi and took over a handicrafts showroom from his cousin Fayaz Ahmed Bhatt. Since 2002, he has been making frequent visits to Bangalore and Srinagar, Mr. Rao said. The police are investigating the student life of Imran in Bangalore and whether he had been sent here in 1991 as part of a larger terrorist conspiracy. To a query, the Commissioner said there were no links between Imran and the two Pakistani nationals who were arrested in Mysore in October last.

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