SAAG : Mumbai Blasts: Breakthrough In Investigations

MUMBAI BLASTS: BREAKTHROUGH IN INVESTIGATIONS

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR -- PAPER NO.131

By B. Raman | September 30, 2006

The Mumbai Police need to be complimented for their painstaking investigation into the seven co-ordinated explosions on July 11,2006, in which over 180 suburban train commuters were killed.

2. They held a press conference at Mumbai on September 30,2006, to share with the media the results of the investigation made by them so far. According to their disclosure, the blasts were carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of Pakistan at the instance of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) with joint teams of Indian and Pakistani members of the LET, with the Indian members having been recruited with the help of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). All the LET members, who participated in the blasts, were trained in a LET training camp at Bahawalpur, which is in the heart of the Seraiki area of Southern Punjab.

3. Bahawalpur, which is the home-town of Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), has generally been known as the stronghold of the JEM, but the LET too has a training camp there, which is run by Azam Cheema, a Pakistani national. Azam Cheema alias Babu, who is No. 3 in the LET of Pakistan and reportedly co-ordinates its operations in India, is Professor of Islamiat at a degree college of Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab. Abu Zubaidah, the No. 3 in Al Qaeda, was arrested by the Pakistani authorities in March, 2002, in the house of an LET operative in Faislabad. The US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had come to know of his having been given shelter by the LET in Faislabad. The ISI arrested him, at the prodding of the CIA, and he was flown out of Pakistan by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for interrogation. At that time, there were reports that Azam Cheema had brought Abu Zubaidah to Faislabad after he had escaped from Afghanistan and organised shelter for him there. Despite this, he was not arrested by the Pakistani authorities and Cheema continued to co-ordinate the operations of the LET in India.

4. The presence of an LET training camp in Bahawalpur came to notice during the interrogation of two LET operatives -- Feroz Abdul Latif Ghaswala alias Abdullah and Mohammad Chippa alias Ubedullah -- arrested by the Delhi police in May,2006. Their interrogation also brought out that they were taken to Teheran via Dhaka with valid visas and immigration stamps on their passports and then clandestinely taken by road from Teheran into Balochistan and then to Bahawalpur for the training. They returned to India after the training by the same route.

5. It would appear that the Indian members of the LET, who had participated in the Mumbai blasts of July 11, 2006, had also travelled to Bahawalpur via Teheran for training with valid Iranian visas and immigration stamps, but with no entries regarding their further travel from Teheran to Bahawalpur via Balochistan.

6. This would indicate that as compared to its involvement in the blasts of March,1993, the ISI had taken greater care this time to maintain the deniability of its involvement. In respect of the blasts of March,1993, there was a continuous chain of evidence of the involvement of the ISI in the blasts as follows:

* Travel of the perpetrators by air from Mumbai to Dubai with entries in their passports and in the passenger manifests of the plane.

* Travel from Dubai to Karachi by a flight of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) in their real names and not under assumed names. Their real names figured in the PIA's passenger manifests. However, their passports did not carry any Pakistani visa or immigration stamp. The ISI took them from Dubai to Karachi with plain paper visas, which were withdrawn from them on their return to Dubai from Karachi after the training.

* Issue to the perpetrators of explosives, chemical timers and hand-grenades from the stocks of the Pakistan Army. While it would be difficult to prove the origin of explosives, the timers were proved to have been from stocks supplied by the US to Pakistan in the 1980s for use in Afghanistan and the grenades were proved to have been manufactured in a Pakistan Government ordnance factory.

7. The new route via Teheran obviates the need for air travel from Teheran to Pakistan. Thus, it would be difficult for the investigating officers to collect documentary evidence of their onward journey from Teheran to Pakistan and their return journey by the same route. To maintain the deniability of its involvement, the ISI would also seem to have taken the additional precaution this time of not giving them any material other than RDX explosives. It would be difficult to prove that the explosives were from Pakistani Government stocks. The perpetrators reportedly used locally-procured mechanical timers (clocks).

8. From the evidence given out by the Mumbai Police at their press conference, it was amply clear that the LET carried out the blasts with the help of a group of Indian and Pakistani Muslims and that the operation was planned and co-ordinated from the LET's camp in Bahawalpur. The perpetrators were trained there.

9. It is interesting to recall that the three British citizens of Pakistani origin, who carried out the London blasts of July, 2005, were also reported to have visited Bahawalpur and that Rashid Rauf, a Mirpuri absconder wanted in a murder case of Birmingham, who was reported by the Pakistani authorities to have acted as a cut-out with an Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda leader in planning the operation to blow up some US-bound planes in August, was arrested in Bahawalpur, where he had been living for three years in a house bought by him. He had married a woman related to Maulana Masood Azhar.

10. The Mumbai Police naturally did not share with the media the details of the evidence regarding the ISI involvement collected by them. Some of the evidence must have come from the interrogation of the 15 persons arrested by the Mumbai Police, including a Pakistani national, of whom the Mumbai Police claim to have direct evidence against 12. The arrested included four of the Indian Muslims who had actually planted the improvised explosive devices in the trains. Of the actual perpetrators, three Indian Muslims and six Pakistanis are reported to be absconding.

11. This would be a fit case for testing out the sincerity of Pakistan to carry out its recently-expressed (at Havana) commitment to co-operate with India in the investigation of terrorism-related cases. If it is really sincere, it should hand over to India Azam Cheema and the absconding Pakistanis for interrogation and prosecution. If it follows its past practice of avoiding action against them under some pretext or the other, that would be a clear indication that its commitment was yet another eye-wash.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: itschen36@gmail.com )