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Lashkar tested sea route to Mumbai in 2007 dry run

MUMBAI: Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders had used a commercial fishing boat to send a fidayeen squad to Mumbai in 2007. Investigators now believe it was a dress rehearsal for the latest terror attacks.

Eight Lashkar fidayeen, all Pakistani nationals, were sent across the seas from Karachi on the morning of March 3. The men arrived in Mumbai late that night, and hid in a safe house near the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. It was organised by a local Lashkar sympathiser.

Unlike the suspected Lashkar fidayeen unit that staged the attacks, the eight-man squad had instructions to travel north from Mumbai to Jammu and Kashmir.

However, Maharashtra Police investigators believe that Lashkar commanders carried out the operation to test the reliability of the Karachi-Mumbai sea route.

Jammu and Kashmir Police investigators say the eight men travelled by road from Bait-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar’s operational headquarters in Muzaffarabad, to Rawalpindi before heading south to Karachi by train.

Travelling in groups of two, they had strict instructions to board separate compartments on the Rawalpindi-Karachi journey, and to avoid conversations with each other and other passengers. In Karachi, they were made to wait in a room on the outskirts of the city for almost a week.

They were finally told that the time had come for them to begin their journey to Mumbai.

Four days out to sea, the commercial fishing boat in which they were travelling was stopped by an Indian Coast Guard vessel.

The boat was allowed to go after its captain paid a bribe. But unknown to them, the “corrupt” Coast Guard officials had used the opportunity to plant a tracking device on the boat. The device later enabled Indian intelligence personnel, who had learned of the Lashkar operation from informants, to track them until the time of their arrest in Jammu.

Interrogation records of Lashkar operatives Jamil Ahmad Awan and Abdul Majid Araiyan, both of whom are being tried for their alleged role in the abortive operation, show how Awan told his interrogators he had joined the Lashkar in November 2005, after hearing incendiary speeches at a mosque in Abbotabad on alleged Indian atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir. The oldest of five children, Awan was working as a wage labourer. He had dropped out of school in Class X two years earlier, after his family found it could no longer pay for his education.

Like Awan, Araiyan was drawn to the Lashkar because it appeared to offer an escape from the tedium of everyday life. A resident of Nawab Shah district in Pakistan’s Sindh province, Araiyan was the youngest of his 90-year-old father’s eight children. In the estimation of his family, the 1987-born Araiyan was the least successful among the children. Despite his family’s hopes, Araiyan proved an academic failure, and dropped out of school in Class IV.

In 2000, Araiyan was persuaded to take up religious classes at a local madrassa: his parents feared he would fall a victim to bad habits.

But after hearing fiery anti-Indian speeches delivered by Lashkar-linked clerics at congregations in rural Punjab, he signed up for military training.

In late 2003, months after President Pervez Musharraf’s government proscribed the Lashkar, Araiyan received a 40-day Daura Khas advanced course in guerrilla warfare techniques. This was at the Lashkar’s sprawling Umm al-Qura camp, which draws its name from an Arabic term sometimes used to denote the city of Mecca. Awan also trained at Umm al-Qura in 2005-2006.

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