March 30, 1998

Arrests by the security forces provide a wealth of evidence pointing to ISI's complicity in the recent wave of terrorist bombings.

By Manoj Joshi and Sayantan Chakravarty

They come across from Pakistan mainly on moonless nights, when the land is enveloped in inky darkness. Moving in twos and threes through the serrated riverine terrain, some are trapped in ambushes, others in hideouts in Jammu. Last month, the BSF killed six infiltrators and captured 21; a number of others were caught by the police.

Ghulam Abbas, son of a farmer in Jhang district in Pakistan, self-proclaimed mujahid (holy warrior) and ISI agent, carried with him a number of explosive devices, some placed inside tiffin boxes. The job, Abbas told India Today, was to "carry out blasts in crowded places in Jammu, Punjab and Delhi". Over 60 blasts have rocked various parts of the country (not counting insurgency-ridden North-east and Kashmir Valley) in the past year, with Delhi accounting for 38, Coimbatore 13, Mumbai three and Jammu for the rest.

Not all Ghulam Abbases get caught, though. Some sneak into Jammu area, others cross over from the swampy Rann of Kutch and even Nepal -- a few of them with legal documents. Mohammed Kamran, Mohammed Hussain and Badruddin, all Pakistani nationals arrested for the blasts that rocked Delhi and surrounding areas in 1997, walked across the poorly-policed Bangladesh border. This is the route taken by another kind of subversive -- the fundamentalist preacher-cum-mujahid who indoctrinates disaffected Indian Muslims to fight the state. All trails finally lead to Pakistan where the Army's shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) coordinates what Indian officials call the "proxy war".

The terrorists prefer the powerful PETN or RDX but these leave "fingerprints" leading to the manufacturer of the explosive. For the random bombings, especially in Delhi where the aim is to create a climate of fear and uncertainty, emphasis is on local material. From his Delhi prison cell, Kamran told India Today that the terrorists call their bomb made of potassium chlorate-sugar mixture ignited by acid the "Imam Sahib" and the potassium chlorate-nitrobenzene combine the "Badam Rogan". Some rogan, some humour.

Last week, in a display of monumental gall, Pakistan complained to the United Nations and other big powers that India was responsible for blasts in Pakistan. The Indian police, which have caught most of the terrorists involved in blasts in India and unravelled the Pakistan connection, were hardly amused.

ISI: THE MASTERMIND

The evidence collected from the dozens of Pakistanis and their Indian collaborators caught by the police points unambiguously to the ISI as the major agency behind a massive covert assault on the country. Criminals and smugglers have been instrumental in bringing in explosives and weapons. Roughly a tonne comes in each year, but the Bombay blasts of 1993 led to the seizure of five tonnes of RDX (two kg is enough for a powerful bomb). In 1994, the police seized 10 tonnes of this explosive in Punjab. Aijaz Rafiq, a petty criminal who was caught with 10 kg of RDX in January 1997 from a Delhi suburb, travelled from Mumbai to Dubai and then to Pakistan. But all his passport showed was the visit to Dubai. In Lahore he was whisked past the immigration control by ISI personnel to a training camp. The same method was used by those who carried out the 1993 Bombay blasts.

The ISI's Joint Intelligence North and Miscellaneous directorates run a massive anti-India operation. The main aim is to aid the insurgency in Kashmir by spreading terror to other parts of the country. Overall coordination is done by one Brigadier Farooq. The Sialkot branch office, just a dozen or so kilometre away from the border, 'runs' the agents who enter the Jammu area. US-trained explosives specialists, Colonel Raja Sarwar Khan and Major Ibrahim, run training camps where instructors often fabricate the more sophisticated devices for the terrorists to take across.

The ISI has many things going for it. All it has to do is to provide training, coordination and sanctuary. Terrorist volunteers come from the swelling ranks of zealots, mainly semi-literate youth "educated" by pan-Islamic groups such as the Markaz-dawa-ul-Irshad (MDI), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) and the Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami. Accomplices are available in India where the rising tide of communal polarisation in the '80s and riots that claimed many Muslim lives have provided a pool of alienated people who fall prey to ISI agent provocateurs.

Kashmir produces its own army of mujahids that enables the ISI to "contract" part of its work to them. Beginning 1992, the ISI got the Ikhwan- ul-Muslimeen led by Hilal Ahmed Baig to launch attacks in places like Delhi as part of Kashmir's "liberation" struggle. For added momentum, the ISI drafted Mushtaq 'Tiger' Memon and Bilal Ahmed Baig for the job along with the services of ISI "stations" in Bangladesh and Nepal.

THE AGENTS

Bilal Baig, who converted the Ikhwan to the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front, and Mushtaq 'Tiger' Memon, the man behind the Bombay blasts, arguably one of the world's deadliest acts of urban terrorism, run the ISI's terrorist war against India from "safe houses" in Rawalpindi. It was once coordinated from Srinagar by Sajjad Ahmad Kenoo, since killed, and Baig's sister Farida, who was arrested after the bombing campaign in northern India in 1995-96.

Multi-layered networks in Nepal, Bangladesh and in certain Indian cities remain. Their core of Kashmiri militants is aided by a contingent of pan-Islamic fanatics of the MDI and the HUA, both headquartered in Pakistan but with acolytes in India and Bangladesh.

Among their main "sub-contractors" in northern India is Abdul Karim, a.k.a. 'Tunda', the 60-year-old chief coordinator of last year's bombing campaign around Delhi. A resident of Pilkhua in Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh -- its dyeing and printing industry offers easy access to some chemicals used for explosives -- Tunda belongs to the Jamaat Ahle-Hadis, a sect of ultra-orthodox Muslims who support the MDI and its military arm, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (let). His chief aide, Mohammed Kamran, a Delhi resident responsible for 23 of the 38 blasts that rocked the capital last year, was arrested on February 28.

Abdul Matin, charged with the Jaipur stadium blast of January 26, 1996, is a resident of Sakhar in Sind and the son of an advocate. After finishing BA first year, he joined the hua. He infiltrated into India in September 1994 to recruit Indians for the jehad. He visited Deoband, Muzaffarnagar, Faizabad, Meerut, Agra and other places for the purpose and among his first recruits was Salar, who carried out the blasts in Jaipur and Dausa in Rajasthan. Matin was arrested in May 1996. "Religion and politics were my motivation," he says. Matin claims he does not know how to make bombs but was trained to use them. "Supply was the job of a different organ."

This is where couriers and organisers like Abdul Ghani alias Asadullah, a Kashmiri militant, come in. He was sent to India in April 1996 by the ISI to establish a base in Ahmedabad. His group, coming through Nepal, supplied the explosives for the Dausa and Delhi blasts of May 1996, but he was arrested the following month by the Gujarat Police. This was kept a secret, and after Asadullah cracked, he agreed to establish contact with 'Tiger'. But when he faxed his first message, "I am going to Mumbai", he also added a word that alerted the ISI to plug that channel.

THE 'MUJAHID'

On December 30, 1997, at 5.30 p.m., Mohammed Husnain a.k.a. Abu Husnain boarded a crowded bus going from the New Delhi railway station towards the west Delhi locality of Nangloi, holding on firmly to a zipped handbag with a three kg Nestle milk powder tin. Inside that was a steel can, stuffed with explosives and sand, a detonator, and a time-piece. Near Karol Bagh, "shivering like a leaf, and feeling mighty scared of a power above", Husnain alighted from the bus. But not before he had switched on the circuit. Twenty minutes later, near the Punjabi Bagh crossing, the bomb exploded, killing four and injuring 24.

Born at Jindraka in Pakistan Punjab's Okara district, he was responsible for seven bomb blasts in and around Delhi in 1997. Husnain, 28, quit a BA course in Karachi in the early '90s and became involved in fundamentalist activities in Pakistan. A motley group of preachers, young and old, harangued the youth to take up arms against the oppressers of Muslim Kashmiris by joining outfits like the let and HUA. "We were constantly told that we must stand up for the liberation of Kashmir," the slightly built, five feet five inch tall Husnain told India Today.

He attended the let's Daura-e-Am (regular training) camp with 400 others in mid-1992 in the hills of Afghanistan's Kunnar province. Later, with a group of 25, he returned for the more rigorous Daura-e-Khas (special training) which lasted 90 days. This included rock-climbing, the use of pistols, light and heavy machine guns, rocket launchers, the AK series rifles, grenades and sniper shooting.

Full of religious zeal, Husnain agreed to go to Kashmir, which he entered with 16 others as part of a group of Al Barq volunteers in September 1995. As the group dispersed, someone also stole his ak-47, two pistols, a rocket bomb and 250 rounds of ammunition. When his colleagues accused him of selling them, he ran away. He drifted to Delhi and began working as a preacher of the Tablighi Jamaat in Nizamuddin and later Sadar Bazaar, where he met Tunda and Kamran and established himself in Garhi, a suburb in south Delhi. He was arrested earlier this month.

THE LOCAL CONNECTION

Husnain's senior partner and Tunda's main aide, Mohammed Kamran, studied up to Class VII at the Mazrul Islam school in the Walled City of Delhi and then went to Pakistan in 1990 to join his brother-in-law's medicine business in Karachi. Attracted to the Ahle-Hadis sect, he soon became a member of the let, ready to fight on behalf of Indian Muslims who, according to the Lashkar maulvis, are being ground by Hindu tyranny. After going through Daura-e-Am and Daura-e-Khas, he was asked to go to Muridke in Pakistan Punjab, the headquarters of the Markaz, where he met Tunda.

In June 1996, Kamran, by now Tunda's most trusted hand, flew to Dhaka from Lahore, stayed at Jatra Bari for a couple of days, and entered India with two Pakistani nationals, Badruddin and Abdullah, who were also arrested earlier this month. He met his accomplices-to-be in small mosques close to Delhi's Jama Masjid and they set up base at Pilkhua and Dhora Tanda, an Ahle-Hadis stronghold in Bareilly. By late 1996, Kamran had joined his mother at Teliwara and told everyone, "I am into the dye business", which was, of course, merely a front for his deadly activities.

Chander Prakash Aggarwal, 42, of Roopwas in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, is accused of supplying 1,000 kg of dynamite to Abdul Matin's gang. According to the police he was, apart from trading in granite, selling dynamite illegally. He lives in an area, known for stone quarrying. It is no secret that there are many people here, as indeed elsewhere in the country, who sell dynamite to criminals and terrorists. During a raid on his godown, huge quantities of gelatin sticks, fuse wires and detonators were seized. Aggarwal, who is on bail, denies the charges, claiming he has been framed for unstated reasons by a co-accused. Aggarwal's is not an isolated case. Others of the majority community -- even some officials from the BSF and Customs -- have been arrested for aiding the smuggling of explosives and arms from Pakistan.

Kashmiri militants and Pakistanis say they are fighting a jehad against India. What's more disturbing is that Indian Muslims are being influenced by pan-Islamic propaganda to take up arms against the state. 'Dr' Abdul Hamid and Pappu Farah of the glass industry hub of Ferozabad, near Delhi, are two such persons charged with helping Abdul Matin and Salar, as are Rais Beg of Agra and Pappu alias Salim of Mathura. All of them now claim innocence. Abdul Rehman, who stored Tunda's explosives at his village in Dhora Tanda in Bareilly, and was also arrested on March 8, belongs to the Jamaat Ahle Hadis.

There is no dearth of fanatics elsewhere. The Al Ummah group in Coimbatore has shown what they can do. Poverty and illiteracy drives many Indian Muslims into the hands of fundamentalist groups which, flush with funds from West Asia, run madrasahs (religious schools) to teach them a brand of pan-Islamism that goes against the grain of a plural tradition such as India's. Unfortunately, events such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid only seem to help their hardline views. "Before that," says a police official in Delhi, "not too many Indian Muslims were willing to take to violent means". Today, sadly, the situation has changed.

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