Bangalore, January 3
In a major breakthrough, the Bangalore police has not only established Pakistani outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba’s (LeT) involvement in the December 28 terrorist attack at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here, but has also arrested its South India operations chief.
The terrorist operative, identified as Abdul Rehman, was taken into custody by a Bangalore police team from Nalgonda in Andhra Pradesh on January 1. He was produced before a local magistrate today, who has remanded him in police custody for 14 days. He is said to be an Indian national, though he had stayed in Saudi Arabia for the last three years.
Abdul Rehman, who is 35 years old, is said to have been given the responsibility of controlling LeT affairs in South India after having received training in Saudi Arabia. He was arrested following a tip-off from the Andhra Pradesh cops after he was unable to explain his presence in Bangalore during the attack at the IISc.
City Police Commissioner Ajai Kumar Singh clarified that Rehman was not the hitman at the IISc as his description did not match the computer-generated portrait of the attacker released by the police last week.
The Police Commissioner said it was premature to say whether Rehman was the mastermind or the abettor. “However, we have established his LeT credentials, besides having other reasons to arrest him”, he said.
The police also claimed that Rehman was responsible for “violent” LeT operations in South India and that his arrest was likely to lead to a major breakthrough in the IISc terrorist attack.
The police is not releasing Rehman’s photograph, saying it might hamper investigations. Nor is it disclosing any specific involvement of Rehman in the IISc attack, revealed on the basis of interrogation of the suspect for the last two days.
The case may take some time to crack, with the city police disclosing that Rehman would be subjected to narco-analysis. This, the police officials, said, was necessary as there were still many missing links and the exact chain of command and the different modules responsible for it were still to be identified.
Meanwhile, police sources said 40 persons, including a number of students, had been questioned with regard to the IISc attack in Bangalore. The police had also stumbled upon outstation students who could have been recruited by the LeT as sleeping operatives. The students were being investigated to find out whether they had provided logistics support or shelter to the perpetrators of the crime.
Meanwhile, the police had fallen back to an earlier theory, announcing today that the attack was conducted by three persons.
