Shillong: The two Lashker-e-Toiba militants,
handed over to India by Bangladesh, have confessed to their
involvement in the serial blasts that rocked Bangalore last
year, a top police official said on Thursday.
Nazir Tarian Dabede (25) alias T Nazir told interrogators
of the Meghalaya Police and BSF that he had planted the bombs
along with a person called Rahim, the official, who is also a
part of the interrogation team, said.
Nazir, a bomb expert, and another LeT operative Siraj
Shamshudeen Shamas (33), both from Kerela, were handed over to
the BSF by Bangladesh's BDR yesterday. The BSF had tipped off
its Bangladesh counterpart about the militants' presence in
that country.
The duo, however, have so far not admitted their
involvement in the attack at the Indian Institute of Sciences
(IISc) in 2005, the official, who did not wish to be named,
said, adding they would be interrogated again today.
Nazir and Siraj had been in Bangladesh for about a year
and they are understood to have revealed vital information
regarding their "bases" in south India.
Nazir's name surfaced in February last year when Mohammed
Yahya Kammukutty, 31, hailing from Mukkom in Kozhikode
district of Kerala, was arrested as part of a probe into a
SIMI network in Karnataka.
According to the official, Nazir said during the
interrogation that five new recruits of the LeT had gone to
Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) for training five months after
the Bangalore blasts. While the four of them were killed by
the Army, the whereabouts of the last one was not yet known.
The duo also revealed the existence of their group's
bases in UAE, Qatar and Bahrain, the official claimed.
A team from the Bangalore Police was scheduled to arrive
today in Shillong to take the custody of the two, police said.
The duo were first interrogated at Pynursla police
station and later brought to Laban police station in Shillong
where they were being interrogated by a special Meghalaya
Police team and central security agencies, sources said.
According to the sources, there was an intelligence
report that a Lashker commander had been in touch with Nazir
and the duo were on a recruitment spree under instructions
from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
PTI
First Published: Thursday, December 03, 2009, 13:51