Arrested terrorist Abdul Karim Tunda has told Delhi Police interrogators that he nurses a grudge against lashkar-e-Tayyeba (leT) commander Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi for scuttling his chances of reaching the top position in the outfit despite being the “architect” of its pan-India structure, earlier confined to Kashmir.
Senior Delhi police officials who interrogated the 70-year-old explosives expert said he blamed lakhvi for keeping him on the “fringes” of leT which carried out a slew of terror attacks in India.
“He says that lakhvi, who is the mastermind of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, made sure that Tunda remained on the fringes of the organisation. He said lakhvi did not allow him to come into the decision-making body,” officials said.
“Tunda claims that he came in contact with leT in 1991 and since then he had worked tirelessly to build and nurture the terror outfit’s structure outside Kashmir. This continued even after he left India and went to Pakistan,” said officials involved in Tunda’s interrogation. They said Tunda also claimed that he was sidelined by the top leT leadership ahead of the 26/11 attacks after his spat with lakhvi over financial issues.
“Despite being one of the key founders of leT’s pan-India operations, Tunda was kept out of the details of the operation. Some of the younger operatives of leT, including Abu Jundal, were being preferred over Tunda,” said another police official. Tunda claimed he was merely informed about the happenings of the Mumbai attack by Jama’at-ud-Da’wah (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed who instructed him to concentrate on Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) into India instead, investigators said.
Tunda, who was holding a Pakistani passport with the name Abdul Quddus, was arrested on August 16 from an area on the Indo-Nepal border after being on the run for 19 years.
Interrogators said Tunda revealed that in 1993, he and Dr Jalees Ansari collaborated with leT to set off a series of explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad.
“He told us that two leT handlers had come to Ansari for the execution of the terror attacks,” the official claimed. During his stay in Pakistan, Tunda told police, he had been in touch with organisations like Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), leT, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Indian Mujahideen (IM) and Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) and had been meeting Hafiz Saeed, Maulana Masood Azhar, Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi, Dawood Ibrahim and several others wanted by India.
According to another officer associated with the interrogation, Tunda is said to take pride in having had access to the top brass of ISI and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and remained in constant touch with Hafiz Saeed and Iqbal Kana.
“He claims that he is ‘respected’ by the people back in Pakistan for his role in carrying out 40 serial bombings in several parts of India,” said the officer.