Contradictions in cops account of terror trail

NEW DELHI: Central intelligence agencies and several state police forces are trying to reconcile the contradictions between their findings of the recent months and the Delhi police’s claims of the last three days about domestic terror groups.

The Delhi police claims about Indian Mujahideen and its relations with Simi’s Safdar Nagori faction and Lashkar-e-Taiba contradict the findings of the investigations over the last few years. These contradictions are emerging even as many within the security establishment are questioning the way the Delhi police went about the raid at Jamia Nagar on Friday.

According to several sources involved in investigating Simi’s Safdar Nagori faction, there is a whole host of questions that the Delhi police claims raise about the findings of others.

Joint Commissioner of police (special cell) Karnail Singh had on Saturday said that Indian Mujahideen and Simi are different groups with the Mumbai techie Abdus Subhan Qureshi alias Tauqeer as the contact between the two.  

But as late as the first week of September, the interrogation reports of the Gujarat police claim that Safdar Nagori had told Sajid Mansuri on August 31, when both met during an identification parade, not to reveal anything about the Indian Mujahideen.
Mansuri was upset about this because he thought Nagori was not bothered about the cadres, according to Gujarat police’s interrogation details. While Nagori is in the custody of the Madhya Pradesh police, Mansuri was arrested by Gujarat police after the Ahmedabad blasts.

The Delhi police on Saturday said the Lashkar-e-Taiba was the common handler of both Simi and Indian Mujahideen. Interrogation over the last two years of Simi members arrested in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere do not corroborate this. In fact, several police investigators have accused Simi of joining hands with Bangladesh-based HuJI (Harkat-ul-Jihad-Islami) for carrying out attacks. And interrogation reports do not corroborate either, while pointing fingers at their affinity to the Taliban.

The only evidence available to show any linkages between LeT and Simi in all the interrogation reports of recent times is of Riazuddin Nasir, the son of a Hyderabad cleric who is in a Gujarat jail for the murder of BJP leader Haren Pandya. It was the arrest of Nasir in Karnataka in January 2008 that helped the central intelligence agencies and state polices to unravel the network of Simi’s Nagori faction, which had formally decided on jihad. Nasir had trained in a LeT camp in Pakistan.

On his return to India, Nasir met Safdar Nagori in Bhopal, and offered to introduce him to the LeT leadership, but Nagori was not keen, according to the reports from Karnataka. Nagori wanted to join the Taliban, whose leader Mullah Omar had been adopted by his faction as their international amir. Nagori was keen to send some of his cadres to fight in Afghanistan, Nasir had told his interrogators.

In all these and several other detailed interrogation of the SIMI cadres there is no indication of the Nagori faction having established any clear links with the LeT.
A senior officer told DNA that their entire investigations over the past several months have been based on the network unravelled after interrogating Nasir, Nagori and several of their key associates arrested elsewhere.

Even the people arrested after the Ahmedabad blasts are all those identified in these interrogation reports. “The names of none of those killed or arrested in Delhi appear in any of those networks or our reports. It is surprising,” he said. Another official said the profiles of the men in their early 20s too do not fit into their investigations over the past couple of years.

According to Gujarat police claims, those who planted the IEDs in Ahmedabad and Surat came from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka. There had been no reference to anyone coming from Delhi in the interrogation reports.

One officer privy to the Delhi encounter told DNA that Mufti Abu Bashar, arrested for playing a key role in the Gujarat blasts, was known to most of those killed and arrested in Jamia Nagar on Friday because they are all from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. “It is possible that some of them have had links or were even involved in the blasts. But I don’t know if Atif (who was killed) was the mastermind of the Indian Mujahideen,” he said.

An Army officer who has led several commando raids on terrorist hideouts told DNA that he was surprised at the “callousness” with which the police approached the entire operation. “Almost none of them were wearing bullet proof jackets, several of them were even in slippers,” he pointed out.

“Before any such operation you carry out a detailed recce, keep the suspects under watch, go in with proper protection suits and provide proper cover. None of it seemed to have been done in this case, otherwise Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma would not have lost his life,” the Army officer said.