 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | PRIZE CATCH: The Al Badr operatives had planned to blow up the state secretariat | | This is one call on his sleek mobile phone that Karnataka state Director-General of Police (DGP) B.S. Sial will not forget easily. Of late, Sial and his men have been working under intense pressure: on one side the mounting Naxal activities in various parts of the state; on the other, unexpected communal riots in unlikeliest of places like Mangalore. So when he got the midnight call, apprehension was writ large on Sial's face. But soon, it turned into relief as the caller, a senior state police official informed him about a 'big catch'. Police are not revealing exactly when Mohammed Ali Hussain and Mohammed Fahad, both 24, were arrested. But it is believed that the arrest took place in the first week of October. The two Pakistani terrorists, both members of the dreaded Al Badr group were nabbed in Mysore, 130 km south of Bangalore. They had sneaked into the city six months ago. "They were helped by locals; some of them touts, in obtaining fake documents to show them as bona fide citizens of Mysore. And they had a devastating terror plan including major strikes in the coming months," says Sial. The two were picked up following a tip-off about their suspicious behaviour by the owner of the house they had rented. The police had been on their trail ever since their application to secure an Indian passport, based on fake documents, was rejected by the passport office in Bangalore. Both were later formally charged with various crimes including violations of the Arms Act, Foreigners' Act, attempt to kill policemen and waging war against India. | | "Once in India, the 'observer agents' melt into the mainstream and report back to their handlers in Pakistan" | | The arrests could not have been better timed. They came just two days before Asia's biggest Information technology exhibition was to begin in Bangalore. The two were planning to damage key tech targets and the state government secretariat buildings, the old Vidhana Soudha and its new identical annexe, the Vikas Soudha. The Mysore Police found out that the two had also done recce of the Central Institute of Regional Languages in Mysore-home to several foreign scholars-for an attack similar to the December 2005 attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Apart from sketches of government buildings and some tech centres, the police also seized from the duo a satellite phone with numbers linked to Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir and some commonly available chemicals used in making improvised explosive devices (IEDs), an ak-47 rifle, a foreign made pistol, detonators, a digital camera and fake passports. Home Ministry sources say Fahad was among the 2,300 Pakistani nationals who have gone missing after arriving in India with valid travel documents in the past five years. He arrived at the Bangalore airport in February 2006 on a 45-day visitor visa to see his grandparents in Kerala, but went missing shortly afterwards. The modus operandi is almost always the same: they destroy their passports and simply melt into the hinterland to become what in espionage parlance is called 'observer agents'-meant to watch and report to their handlers or sleeper agents, activated only for an operation, in this case an attack on the Karnataka Assembly. They set up a front, usually an std booth or a grocery shop-Fahad ran a gift shop- which allows them to collect intelligence. Fahad's parents migrated from Kerala to Pakistan in 1971 and he was recruited by Al Badr for his ability to speak Malayalam. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | FIRST STRIKE: The scene after the attack on the IISc, last year | | Sial says the Centre and authorities in the southern states are working in coordination to get down to the roots of the terror networks in the south. Kerala Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan has said there were indications of Pakistan-sponsored terrorist activities in Kerala. "Central security agencies and state police have chalked out combined operations to detect this," he says. According to state police sources, the Pakistan-backed terror groups have been trying to sneak into south India and Al Badr was specially formed with this objective. Senior police officials admit intelligence is still an area of concern. Apart from linguistic barriers, the number of counter-insurgency cops in Karnataka is far from adequate. Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy has done his bit to encourage police by donating patrol vehicles to the understaffed, overworked Bangalore police: the city has just 13,000 police personnel for seven million people. The number of personnel in the crime, law and order and intelligence wings is much less. The state government's Rs 700-crore police modernisation programme is on, but the Bangalore Police is yet to upgrade itself to the challenges of terrorism. The disappearance of nearly a hundred Pakistani nationals over the last few decades in Bangalore alone exposes the weakness in police intelligence. Foreigners entering the city have to register at the nearest police station-many give false addresses and slip away. | "An attack on Bangalore will attract instant global attention."
DEEPAK PULIPATI,
AURIGO SOFTWARE | | The December 2005 attack, intelligence agencies say, was only a precursor to attacks on the information technology sector, with some of the biggest firms present in Bangalore. The same sources had predicted that terror groups would aim soft targets in south India, home to nearly a hundred defence and research establishments and software behemoths like Infosys and Wipro. "Their strategy was to hit the headlines by moving their targets from politicians to intellectual brains that are present in science and tech capitals like Bangalore," says former Bangalore police chief H.T. Sangliana. "An attack on a Bangalorean infotech facility will attract instant global attention," says Deepak Pulipati, founder of Aurigo Software, which has operations in New York and Bangalore. Karnataka alone accounts for nearly half of India's total Rs 90,000-crore infotech revenues every year, which is nearly 4 per cent of the country's GDP. Nearly three lakh techies work in the state, a majority in cities like Bangalore, Mysore and Mangalore and several thousands more in other cities like Hyderabad, Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram. With the terror network moving down south, the Indian security establishment has some more homework to do. | | | | | |
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