LeT operatives admit involvement in B’lore blasts

Dec. 3: The two Lashker-e-Tayyaba militants, handed over to India by Bangladesh, have confessed to their involvement in the serial blasts that rocked Bengaluru 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 Kerala, were handed over to the BSF by Bangladesh's BDR on Wednesday. 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 on Thursday.

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 Bengaluru police was scheduled to arrive on Thursday 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).

The two LeT militants were produced before the court of additional district magistrate here amid heavy security. They have been remanded in judicial custody for one day.