Bangalore: A safe haven riddled with terror plots

Bangalore: A safe haven riddled with terror plots
Thursday July 5 2007 00:36 IST

BANGALORE: When the Bangalore police caught the Saudi-returned Abdul Rehman from Nalgonda in January 2006, the chase for his alleged terrorist networks led them to very unlikely places in Karnataka: Bhadravati, Kolar, Mangalore and the outskirts of Bangalore.

Though Rehman’s group seem to have had no direct link to the IISC case, what the police investigations indicated was an ever-present danger of various dormant cells, each carrying out a set of tasks.

Bangalore has for long been perceived as a safe haven for terror cells, and a spate of incidents recently have only been reinforcing the perception.

The situation, however, may not be very different from other major cities, with the National Security Advisor saying so last year -- M K Narayanan had said it was no secret that terrorists were targeting the IT sector.

A common thread in the spate of terror-related incidents reported from Bangalore in the past has been the relative ease with which alleged terror networks took orders from commanders based in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir or elsewhere, and the regular monetary remittances that kept them going.

For instance, the police charge-sheet on Kashmir-native Imran alias Bilal Ahmed Kota filed earlier this year says that he used a satellite phone as well as e-mail to communicate with Abu Alqama -- described as Lashkar-e-Taiba’s chief of India operations -- from Hampi where he ran a handicraft store.

Imran was allegedly following instructions to carry out an attack here, but police are also certain that he was well networked with many other Lashkar cadre, including Tariq Ahmed Dar who was arrested for the 2005 Diwali blasts in Delhi.

Though Imran’s arrest also threw new light on the IISC case, the December 2005 attack has, in many ways, changed the mindset of the local police, who have been finding that hitherto unconnected incidents elsewhere in the country could have deeper links.

That fact was ascertained when the IISc investigations took the police to Hyderabad, Kashmir and several other places across the country. Of course, it had been constant monitoring by the Central Intelligence that led to the arrest of Imran, Rehman and the two Pakistani nationals caught in Mysore last October.

But extremist networks have been noticed earlier, in the church bomb blasts in Bangalore and Hubli in 2000 and an abortive attempt by a Tamil nationalist group who were caught in Frazer Town in 2002.

Besides, what the Bangalore police have come to realise through these investigations was that a good deal of ‘recruitment’ was going on -- some of the youngsters they arrested had been sent to Bangladesh and Pakistan for training.

Rehman, police allege, began running a network from Saudi Arabia through ‘hawala’ transactions, while Imran became a JKLF member in 1990.

If there was indeed any link between the failed UK terror attacks and the Bangalore doctors arrested two days ago, the only difference would be that they were well-educated youth who fell prey.