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Here's all you need to know about Abdul Karim Tunda

Top Lashkar-e-Toiba bomb expert Abdul Karim Tunda, one of the 20 terrorists India had asked Pakistan to hand over after the 26/11 Mumbai attack, was on Tuesday discharged by a Delhi court in a case lodged against him in 1994 under the stringent Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA).

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Top Lashkar-e-Toiba bomb expert Abdul Karim Tunda, one of the 20 terrorists India had asked Pakistan to hand over after the 26/11 Mumbai attack, was on Tuesday discharged by a Delhi court in a case lodged against him in 1994 under the stringent Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA).

However, Tunda will have to remain in jail as there are several pending cases against him.

Special Cell of Delhi Police had filed a charge sheet against Tunda in the case in which five accused were arrested on January 17, 1994 and 150 kg explosives and six daggers were allegedly recovered from their possession.

Here are a few things you need to know about Tunda:

- Now 71-years-old, Tunda was born in 1943 in Delhi's Daryaganj area.

- Soon after his birth, Tunda along with his family shifted to their native village in Bazaar Khurd area in Pilkhuwa in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad district. Tunda lived here with his wife till 1992.

- Tunda worked as a carpenter, scrap dealer and cloth merchant till the age of 40, before becoming a radicalised jehadi militant, Delhi police said. He is also said to have ran a homoeopathic shop in the early 1980's.

- He received his training in making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Pakistan. He then came in contact of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives and soon became the top bomb maker for the terror organisation.

- Following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 in Uttar Pradesh, Tunda floated a radical organisation in Mumbai.

- In January 1994, Tunda fled to Bangladesh capital Dhaka where he started training jehadis in bomb making. Investigators said Tunda also trained terror operatives in making improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

- An Interpol Red Corner notice was issued against Tunda in 1996.

- Tunda's two Bangladeshi students, Mato-ur Rehman and Akbar alias Haroon, were arrested from Sadar Bazar railway station in Delhi in February 1998. Police later arrested 24 other members of the "module".

- His younger brother Abdul Malik (a carpenter) is reportedly the only immediate family member alive in India..

- For some years Tunda lay low and investigators thought he had died in a blast in Bangladesh in 2000.

- The hunt for him virtually ended at one point when it was believed that he had been killed in a blast in Bangladesh.

- Five years later, Abdul Razzak Masood, an alleged LeT chief coordinator in Dubai, arrested by the Special Cell of Delhi Police, however, told investigators that Tunda was alive and he met him in Lahore in December 2003.

- In 2008, Tunda alias Abdul Quddus figured in the list of terrorists which India handed over to Pakistan after the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. This list includes people like Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar, and Dawood Ibrahim.

- Five years back, Tunda, then 65, got married for the third time to a 18-year-old girl in Pakistan.

- He got his name 'Tunda' - Hindi for without a hand - after losing an arm while while he was preparing a bomb in 1985 in Mumbai.

- He is one of the three co-founders of the jehadi movement in India. Tunda is involved in 33 terror attack cases between 1994 and 1998 in Delhi and other states.

- Post 1997, he shuttled between Karachi, Kenya and West Asia and also travelled from Pakistan to Bangladesh over the past decade.

With inputs from agencies.

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