The Hindu : Karnataka News : Police get portrait prepared to confirm Abu Hamza’s identity

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Tuesday, Feb 12, 2008
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Karnataka

Police get portrait prepared to confirm Abu Hamza’s identity

K.V. Subramanya

Portrait has been taken to Lucknow
It will shown to Sabahuddin, LeT operative

BANGALORE: The Bangalore police have prepared a portrait of Abu Hamza, a Pakistani national who is said to have carried out the attack on the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here, and taken it to Lucknow to confirm his identity and complicity in the attack.

Highly placed sources in the police told The Hindu on Monday that the portrait would be shown to Mohammed Sabahuddin (23), an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative, arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police.

Sabahuddin has claimed that with his assistance Hamza executed the attack on the IISc on December 28, 2005, in which a professor from Delhi was killed. The attack also left four persons injured.

The police have prepared the portrait on the basis of Hamza’s description given by terror suspect Riyazuddin Nasir, who was arrested by the Davangere police on January 11.

The sources said Nasir had told the interrogators that he had met Hamza while he was undergoing arms training in Pakistan. Nasir had given an almost first-hand account of the attack, apparently on the basis of what Hamza had explained to him.

Nasir has explained how Hamza, who arrived in an autorickshaw at the IISc, carried out the attack, later changed his clothes and escaped after jumping over the compound. He has given some details such as how the trigger of the riffle got stuck while Hamza was firing the rounds and how the grenades failed to explode, the sources said.

The portrait of the attacker, which was prepared soon after the shoot-out on the basis of inputs given by the victims and other eye-witnesses, was also shown to Nasir. However, he claimed that the portrait did not resemble Hamza, the sources said.

Meanwhile, following the information revealed by Sabahuddin in Lucknow, the police have started questioning some people in Bangalore to ascertain their links with him. A police team from Bangalore, which questioned Sabahuddin in the Uttar Pradesh capital, is likely to interrogate him further. Subsequently, the Bangalore police would take him into their custody and bring him here, the sources said.

While the police are tight-lipped about Sabahuddin’s activities during his stay in Bangalore, it has come to light that he had studied at a private college in Kempapura in Hebbal police station limits.

Sabahuddin came to Bangalore in mid-2005 after undergoing arms training in Pakistan. During his stay here, he had surveyed the IISc and provided the details of the vast campus and its security system to his handlers abroad.

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