The Hindu : Front Page : Intelligence had warned of strikes

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 27, 2007
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Intelligence had warned of strikes

Praveen Swami

Explosives were delivered five months ago to HuJI cell preparing for attacks in Hyderabad

NEW DELHI: India’s Intelligence services learned over five months ago that an eight-kg consignment of military-grade explosives had been delivered to a Harkat ul-Jihadi-e-Islami terror cell preparing for strikes in Hyderabad.

Alarm bells went off in the intelligence community after the March 2007 arrest of a HuJI squad on the India-Bangladesh border in West Bengal.

The team included two Pakistani nationals — Mohammad Yunus from Haripur, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, and Karachi resident Abdullah Rafi — and Muzaffar Ahmad Rather, a resident of Kulgam in southern Kashmir.

Investigators learned of HuJI’s Hyderabad plans from the fourth member of the cell, Aurangabad-based computer engineer Sheikh Naim Sheikh.

Naim, who had been recruited by HuJI second-in-command Mohammad Amjad during a January 2007 visit to Saudi Arabia, said he had delivered a consignment of Research Department Explosive to Hyderabad on an earlier run across the India-Bangladesh border.

The explosives, Naim said, were meant for a major operation conducted by HuJI’s Karachi-based commander, Abdul Sahil Mohammad. Mohammad had been recruited to the HuJI after the 2003 communal pogrom in Gujarat by his relative and mentor, mafioso Rasool Khan ‘Party.’ After executing an October 2005 attack on the Hyderabad Police’s Special Task Force headquarters, Mohammad fled to Karachi.

Based on Naim’s information, police in Hyderabad were able to track his contact – a bank clerk named Mohammad Imran. Imran, it turned out, had also helped obtain false passports for several key HuJI operatives. By the time police caught up with the bank clerk, though, he had passed on the explosives to two men he knew only by code-names. Neither was ever found.

When nine people were killed in the bombing of Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid in May, the costs of that failure became apparent.

Investigators were able to determine that the bomb was built by a Bangladeshi national code-named ‘Hamza,’ and that funds for the network had been brought in by Mohammad’s brother, Mohammad Qadir — but of the actual perpetrators, there was no trace.

Many reverses

Investigators now faced several successive reverses. Efforts to infiltrate Mohammad’s Bangladesh network also collapsed after a police mole, Abdul Sattar, switched sides and joined the terrorists he had been spying on.

Police plans for the detention of several dozen suspected HuJI sympathisers were also shot down by State government authorities, who feared that such offensive action would fuel communal tension.

From electronic intercepts, India’s intelligence services became aware that further attacks were imminent. Through July and early August, Mohammad left dozens of internet-chat messages for his Hyderabad operative, asking them to go ahead with the plans he had authorised. Neither the targets nor the identities of these operatives could be established.

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