Saturday, December 5, 2009

LeT duo admits role in B'lore blasts

S
HILLONG: The two Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) militants, who were handed over to India by Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) near the Indo-Bangla border in
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Meghalaya on Wednesday, have reportedly admitted their involvement in the serial blasts that rocked Bangalore last year.

"Nazir Tarian Dabede (25), alias T Nazir, told interrogators of Meghalaya Police and BSF that he had planted the bombs along with another person, Rahim," a top police official said here on Thursday. "The duo did not admit their involvement in the 2005 terror attack on the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) in Bangalore," the official said.

Nazir, a bomb expert, and another LeT operative, Siraj Shamshudeen Shamas, 33, were handed over to BSF by BDR on Wednesday at Erbamon village in Meghalaya's East Khasi Hills after the two security agencies had shared intelligence inputs about their presence in that country.

The militants, who were on Thursday remanded to a day's judicial custody by the additional district magistrate, are likely to be taken to Bangalore on Friday.

A team from Bangalore Police, led by an ACP, has arrived here and formalities were on to take the two militants to Karnataka, officials said. Incidentally, the LeT duo is from Kerala.

Nazir and Siraj, who were in Bangladesh about a year, have reportedly revealed some "vital information" about their bases in south India during the interrogation.

Nazir's name surfaced in February last year when Mohammed Yahya Kammukutty, 31 was arrested as part of a probe into a SIMI network in Karnataka that has already led to the arrest of six youths, including four medical students, from the northern part of the southern state. Kammukutty is a resident of Mukkom in Kerala's Kozhikode district.

The police officer said Nazir also revealed during interrogation that five new LeT recruits had gone to PoK for a five-month training after the Bangalore blasts. "Four of them were killed by the army, while the whereabouts of one are not known yet," the official added.

Nazir and Siraj reportedly told of the existence of the LeT's bases in UAE, Qatar and Bahrain. The duo was first interrogated at the Pynursla police station and later brought to Laban police station in Shillong where they were being quizzed by a special Meghalaya Police team and central security agencies, the sources said.

Intelligence agencies suspect that a Lashker "commander" had been in touch with Nazir and the duo was on a "recruitment spree" following ISI's orders.

Nazir was arrested after FBI's inputs to Bangladesh about LeT's plan to carry out attacks on the US embassy and the Indian high commission in Dhaka last month. The US agency had unearthed the LeT plan after interrogating the terror duo David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana in Chicago for plotting attacks on India and Denmark.

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