Serial bomber & LeT man arrested

Nearly 15 years since the hunt for him began, Abdul Karim Tunda, one of India's most wanted terrorists, was arrested after a successful intelligence operation carried out by officials of the R&AW, along with their counterparts in the UAE, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia.

UAE authorities tipped off their Indian intelligence counterparts that Tunda, who is allegedly behind nearly 45 bomb attacks in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Sonepat, was living in Dubai. The original information about his whereabouts is believed to have come from the Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, the Saudi Arabian intelligence agency.

The process to get terrorists involved in various bomb attacks started a few years ago when India’s external agency brought back Abu Jundal last year. He gave details of where terrorists like Abdul Sathar and Tunda were.

Working with the CIA, New Delhi managed to convince the UAE authorities to hand them over.
These men were “deported” for various violations and were then packed off under the watchful eyes of R&AW agents. In the case of Tunda, he was sent to Bangladesh from the UAE . From there, he landed at the Kathmandu airport late on Thursday, was taken to the Indo-Nepal border and arrested at Banbasa-Mahendernagar on the Indo-Nepal border at 3pm on Friday. He was handed over to a waiting Delhi police special cell team, which brought him to Delhi on Saturday, and produced him before court. He has been sent to police custody for three days.

On his arrest he was found to be carrying a Pakistani passport, issued on January 23 in the name of Abdul Quddooss. In the dossiers handed over to Islamabad after the 26/11 attacks, Tunda figured pretty high on the list and was also identified as ‘Quddooss’. The Indian intelligence had cottoned to his assumed name following intercepts of communications between terrorist cells.

A resident of Daryaganj in Old Delhi, Tunda moved to Pilukhuwa in Ghaziabad before shifting to Mominpura in Mumbai in the mid-80s. Over 70 years old, Tunda was a dreaded name who was not only behind some of the most audacious terror attacks that took place after the 1992 communal riots in Mumbai, but trained a battery of terrorists later.

Tunda is believed to have then masterminded the serial blasts in Hyderabad and later in Delhi, both in 1996 and 1998. After these blasts, the Delhi police had arrested Tunda’s 24 operatives.

Tunda also travelled to Bangladesh with the help of the Pakistani ISI and started to operate from Dhaka. He was hosted by the Islamic Chhatra Shibir (Islamic Students' Organisation), which was closely affiliated with the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Islami.

He returned to India briefly in December 1996 to carry out bomb attacks in Kanpur and Varanasi.
After that, Tunda disappeared and re-surfaced in Murdike, the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan. There, he trained terrorists in the art of making improvised explosive devices using chemicals like nitro-benzene, urea, nitric acid and sugar. He also innovated by adding a pressure cooker or a tiffin box, and filled them up with nails and shrapnel to inflict maximum damage. Ironically, he blew up his left hand while experimenting with a bomb. Since then, the name 'Tunda' stuck.

Tunda was a self-taught bomb-maker, learning his craft while dealing with scrap in the back lanes of Delhi. By the time he was in Mumbai, he had already tied up with the ISI and began to plan the serial blasts in 1993.

As his name spread, he started planning more attacks across the country. By the time he arrived at Muridke, LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and his cohorts were all set to make him their chief bomb maker and trainer. In fact, every time Indian intelligence picked up a Pakistan-trained terrorist, he recounted tales of the extensive training he had received from Tunda, who was now a larger-than-life figure.

Tunda is believed to have been constantly on the move between Pakistan, Bangladesh and the UAE, meeting terrorist cells and also arranging for funds. His close connections with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, Babbar Khalsa militants and Rohingyan operatives in Mayanmar make him all the more an important catch for India.

He married three times — once in Delhi, then Gujarat and, finally, in Bangladesh. All his wives and their children are suspected to be in Pakistan. Only his brother lives in Pilukhuwa, Ghaziabad.

The police claim that Tunda had attempted to carry out a major terrorist attack in Delhi just before the Commonwealth Games in 2010.