The US State Department and a host of officials from American covert agencies are set to make a beeline to India to get first-hand account and perspectives on the National Thowheed Jamat (NTJ) that executed the deadliest attack in the region in the last one decade by hitting luxury hotels and churches in Sri Lanka on Sunday.
The move comes as the US State Department was caught unaware despite the NTJ twitter handle following at least six officials of the US State department officials but could not get an assessment on the outfit’s nefarious agenda even as India provided actionable inputs to Colombo two weeks before the bombings. The NTJ handle followed a total of 28 handles.
Interestingly, the security architecture of the servers of NTJ’s online services is also based in the US which also hosts the servers of Pakistan-based terror groups Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba as also the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).
According to the inputs provided by India over two weeks before the serial suicide bombings, the NTJ was planning to target five-star hotels and churches following which the Sri Lankan police issued an alert to various police units but could not prevent the attacks.
As per the inputs with the Indian agencies, the NTJ had first tried to hit the Indian embassy in Colombo on April 4 but after finding the security tight enough, the outfit tried to target the US embassy on April 11 but to no avail. Following the failures, the NTJ decided to target the luxury hotels and the churches on April 21.
Post-26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, the who’s who of American intelligence and investigation agencies had travelled to Mumbai to question Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorists nabbed in the case.
However, the NIA team had returned empty-handed from the US that had visited the US in 2009 to quiz David Coleman Headley, one of the conspirators of the Mumbai terror attacks.
The NTJ clearly posed itself as an anti-democracy organization and posted radical religious posts on itsTwitter handle with a follower base of around 3,000 people.
