The Indian Army knows them by the abbreviation-ft or foreign terrorist. Ideologically souped up jehadis who kill without mercy, specialise in suicide attacks and when cornered, fight to the finish. Not that they have a choice. "We have tacit orders," says a senior army official in the Valley. "LTs (local terrorists) are to be captured, but not FTs."

Investigating agencies believe the five terrorists who went down in a hail of bullets while trying to storm the Ayodhya shrine on July 5 were from the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

Floated in 1990 by the Markaz-Dawa-Wal-Irshad (or the Centre for Religious Learning and Propagation), a fundamentalist seminary operating out of its heavily guarded headquarters at Muridke near Lahore, the LeT, or Army of the Pure, made a dramatic appearance in Jammu and Kashmir after the Kargil war by introducing suicide attacks, a phenomenon alien to Kashmiri militancy. Of the 180-odd attacks in the past six years, including the strikes on Parliament House and J&K Assembly, about 95 per cent had the LeT's stamp.

In the decade since it appeared in the Valley the LeT has grown into a force that has all but edged out local terrorist groups. In doing so, it has realised the aims of the ISI which backed it as an alternative to Kashmiri militant groups like the Hizb-ul Mujahideen which it felt had been weakened by India.

The LeT draws its strength from Al-Qaida with which it enjoys close ties. Osama bin Laden is believed to have given it the seed money of $2,00,000 (Rs 85 lakh). Later, in 1998, it became one of the 13 Sunni Islamic groups which pledged itself to the International Islamic Jehad (IIJ) founded by bin Laden in Afghanistan. Now, with the Al-Qaida leadership on the run, the LeT may be taking over. "The LeT today controls the activities of the IIJ,'' says B. Raman, former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat.

LeT IT GROW

Hafiz Sayeed and Zafar Iqbal of Lahore's Engineering University, and Abdullah Azzam of the International Islamic University, Islamabad, establish Markaz-Dawa-Wal-Irshad in 1987. Osama bin Laden gives $2,00,000 grant to set up Markaz-Dawa-Wal-Irshad's military wing, Lashkar-e-Toiba. Azzam is bin Laden's religious and political mentor. His speeches and publications are used as textbooks to motivate and indoctrinate LeT cadres. In early 1990s, Sayeed directs the LeT to focus on the disintegration of India. LeT begins fidayeen attacks after 1999.

"The LeT and Al-Qaida share ideology and infrastructure," says a top security official in Kashmir. Most of the LeT top-rung leaders are Afghan war veterans who had trained in the Kunar province of Afghanistan and were part of the Taliban militia till the 9/11 attacks. "The battle-hardened LeT militants are the main trainers at the jehadi camps," says a police intelligence official in Srinagar. "They are not sent to Kashmir now because they are considered too valuable and are projected as iconic jehadis before the recruits."

LeT-trained recruits have been arrested across the globe-Australia made the first arrest under its new anti-terror laws in April 2004. In September 2003, Pakistani authorities arrested 15 Malaysian and Indonesian students of various LeT-run madarsas in Karachi, including Gun Gun Rusman Gunawan, brother of Jemaah Islamiyah's operational commander and senior Al-Qaida leader Hambali.

Earlier, in April 2002, a joint team of US and Pakistani forces swooped down on a house in Faisalabad, capturing Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaida's No. 3 and its military operations chief. The house belonged to Hameedullah Khan Niazi, the local LeT chief. But while Zubaydah was hauled away for interrogation by the Americans, Pakistani authorities refused to part with Niazi.

If this incident showed how the LeT and Al-Qaida were in cahoots with each other, it also exposed the double game being played by the US' frontline ally in the war on terror. "Pakistan has two approaches to fighting terror,'' says Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee. "It is proactive in fighting terrorism on its western frontier but not as proactive on its eastern borders. The infrastructure for training terrorists is intact.''

LeT's terror tactics and deep-seated connections with Al-Qaida and the ousted Taliban regime came under the US scanner after 9/11. Coupled with Delhi's persistent claims about the LeT's hand in the Parliament attack, the US designated it as a foreign terrorist organisation, which prompted Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's clampdown in January 2002 on five terror outfits operating from Pakistan.

LeT chief Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, a university teacher-turned-fundamentalist preacher, was arrested but freed in the absence of any specific charges against him. To sidestep US pressure, Sayeed dissolved his organisation before Musharraf's ban and floated the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The LeT was rechristened the Tehrik-e-Furqan and it claimed it would operate only in PoK under Abdul Wahid Kashmiri. But these were only cosmetic changes.

AYODHYA

Jehadi Jigsaw A 20-man LeT module operating in three states aided and executed the plan to attack the shrine Two years of meticulous planning went into the July 5 terrorist attack on the Ram temple at Ayodhya, with the attackers spending up to six months familiarising themselves with Ambedkar Nagar and Ayodhya.   PICTURE SPEAK QUESTIONABLE EVIDENCE: Khan's version of the events raises more questions than it answers The Lashkar-e-Toiba, which had planned the attack to blow up the makeshift shrine, had raised a 20-man module with different responsibilities in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir to aid and execute it. "At least eight of them had been trained in PoK to work as a suicide squad to avenge the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992," says a senior Special Task Force official. There were at least six people based in Ayodhya and Faizabad, adjoining Ambedkar Nagar and Delhi, acting as informers and guides. A visiting card recovered from one of the dead terrorists led the police to a shop in Lucknow which the militants had visited two days before the attack and purchased the haversacks which were used to carry the arms, ammunition and explosives. Two of the five terrorists, the police say, reached their destination via Lucknow and met the others in Ambedkar Nagar, where they had collected the arms and ammunition from an unidentified accomplice. A cell phone recovered from the slain terrorists has helped the investigating agencies piece together the militants' plan of attack. The SIM card, purchased by the terrorists from a shop in Sultanpur (after providing a fake Jalandhar driving licence), was used to make a flurry of calls to Lucknow, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan a few minutes before the 90-minute firefight with the crpf. The phone belonged to Rehan Khan, whose jeep the terrorists had hired to reach the temple. The terrorists took the mobile phone from Khan, put in their own SIM card and spoke to their sources between 7 a.m., when they hired Khan's jeep, and the attack. The only piece that doesn't fit in, says the police, is the driver's version. Khan had initially maintained that five persons who claimed they were pilgrims turned up at his residence and forced him to drive them to Ayodhya. On the way, the five men forced him out of the vehicle and drove away. The local police caught Khan while he was running away from the spot. However, Khan failed to mention that the men had given him a bag containing Rs 7,000 and some live cartridges. He had also made several calls from a PCO near his house to Kashmir, Delhi and Dubai before the incident. Khan had purchased the jeep for about Rs 3.5 lakh with a bank loan and he recently cleared the entire loan amount. The police are also investigating whether it was Khan who actively assisted the terrorists in mapping out the route to the temple. Further breakthroughs could now hinge on his testimony. -By Subhash Mishra

Notwithstanding the Pakistani regime's ban-and-banish tactics in the face of American pressure and the ongoing India-Pakistan peace engagement, the LeT is the only outfit that still retains its terrorist infrastructure. It organises mercenary recruitment and fund-collection campaigns in Pakistan as well as mock funerals of cadres slain in the Valley. But its training camps are located in PoK. A Home Ministry official says this is because "Pakistan is keeping the LeT as the lynchpin of its terror card in case the peace process doesn't work out the way it wants".

But again, unlike other militant outfits, the LeT swears by jehad to liberate not J&K alone but establish the supremacy of Islam all over India. After the "liberation" of Kashmir, the LeT plans to foment insurrection in Hyderabad and Junagadh, two territories it says were ceded to Pakistan, and then eventually the "liberation" of all Indian Muslims and creation of a separate homeland within India. To achieve these aims, the LeT has spread throughout India. In the past five years, it has not only emerged as the deadliest terror group in J&K but has also mounted some of the most audacious terror strikes across India.

All the 20-odd terror modules busted by security agencies in the past four years belonged to LeT. In the past six months alone, the Delhi Police has busted at least three LeT modules. They believe more such modules could be active. The last module uncovered in Delhi in March had plans not only to attack officer cadets of the Indian Military Academy but also software companies Infosys and Wipro.

Each module is an independent unit operating directly under the control of Saifullah, the LeT's Pakistan-based operations commander. To prevent the entire organisation from being compromised in the event of the capture of cadres, these modules have no knowledge of other LeT operatives. They are periodically replenished by Saifullah's logistics handlers in various cities who provide them everything from arms and ammunition to vehicles and hawala funds. Operations in South and western India are controlled by the LeT's office in Saudi Arabia headed by an operative called Abu Hamza, who had planned the Mumbai blasts in 2003, which killed over 52 people.

"The LeT has proliferated beyond Kashmir on the strength of its pan-Islamic agenda," says a top security official. In an attempt to enlarge its funding and logistics, it has been acquiring a global profile. In June 2003, US security officials busted LeT sleeper cells in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland, the so-called Virginia Jehad network. Particularly insightful was the testimony of Wally Brigitte, who was with the French Navy, captured for planning attacks in Sydney last year. Brigitte, who was deported and later jailed in France, confessed he was trained at an LeT camp near Lahore with nearly 3,000 other recruits.

Security officials believe the LeT and Al-Qaida have common financing sources, mostly in Saudi Arabia, and the LeT gets substantial funds from expatriate Pakistanis in Britain, western Europe and Saudi Arabia. Following the 9/11 attacks, it reportedly collected $2,80,000 in donations from Britain's Pakistani community.

But while Al-Qaida sits squarely in the sights of the global war on terror, its subcontinental clone remains just below it.

CROSS-BORDER TERROR

Renewed Battle The WTC attack brought terrorism to the top of the global agenda. After the London blasts, there is hope that the world would unite for concerted action against nations still harbouring terrorism. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh heads for Washington for a summit meeting with US President George W. Bush, India's message would be that the war against terror cannot be won till the problem is tackled without any bias. South Block sources say that post 7/7 India will do all it can to assist global efforts to combat terrorism and also turn up the heat on Pakistan, which has continued to be a breeding ground for militants. "The world would have to act on the double standard of countries like Pakistan. Terrorists are being trained by senior Pakistani ministers even though they claim to be allies in the war against terror," says a senior Indian official.   PICTURE SPEAK ARMS AND THE MEN: LeT terrorists in PoK There is much evidence in support. Intelligence reports point to Pakistan rearming Sikh terrorists to open another front against India-the arrest of Babbar Khalsa militants involved in the Delhi movie theatre bombings has pointed to the isi's involvement. There has been a spate of terror strikes in Jammu and Kashmir in the recent past and the Ayodhya attack appears to have been carried out specifically to create communal tension. Not just that. After the revelation of Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid's involvement in training terrorists, the head of Jamaat-ud-Daawa, the political grouping of the Laskhar-e-Toiba, H.M. Sayeed said his son participated in the jehad in Kashmir. Armed with fresh proof of terror camps in Pakistan, Manmohan is bound to raise the issue when he meets Bush on July 18. "We have told Pakistan they will have to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism. We told them we can provide photographic evidence. Continuing with terrorism doesn't augur well for the peace process," External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh told India Today. But Islamabad alone is not a problem area. Sources say the international community needs to focus on countries like Bangladesh, where terrorist camps are operating in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Also on India's agenda would be an attempt to move its draft on a Comprehensive Convention on Terrorism at the UN, in the bin for the past 10 years, to the fast track. "The US is working more closely with us so that a comprehensive convention on terrorism is finalised soon," says a senior mea official. -By Saurabh Shukla

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