New Delhi:
A day after Pakistan said it rejects any insinuation of state support for the terrorists who ravaged Mumbai in 2008, Abu Jundal has provided crucial details that suggest the opposite. The terrorist has said that an officer from Pakistan's military intelligence agency, ISI, provided two cartons of cartridges that were used during the 26/11 attacks.
Jundal is in the custody of the Delhi Police after he was deported from Saudi Arabia last month. The ISI officer he refers to is Major Sameer. Jundal is originally from Maharashtra; he has said he was in a control room in Karachi which coordinated and instructed the ten terrorists who opened fire at Mumbai landmarks, killing 166 people. Over the last few days, his interrogation has led to references to a series of ISI officers.
The terrorists who were deputed to Mumbai were trained, he has said, at camp Bait-ul-Mujahideen near Muzaffarabad. Here, he says, Major Sameer dropped in to share two cartons of AK47 cartridges that were taken by the terrorists to Mumbai.
Pakistani-American David Headley, who has been convicted in the US of scouting targets in Mumbai for the Lashkar-e-Taiba ahead of the attacks, has also identified Sameer Ali as a major in the ISI who had recruited him.
Jundal has told Indian officials that after 26/11, the control room in Karachi was raided and those who had been based there were asked to disperse. Lashkar commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi was arrested, and a handler named Muzammil, who like Jundal passed on instructions to the men in Mumbai, took over as the Lashkar chief. He allegedly took Jundal to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir to meet an officer of the ISI who was referred to by the terrorists as Colonel Hamza. This officer allegedly ensured that Jundal was not arrested (he travelled to Saudi Arabia on a Pakistani passport in March 2011). Muzammil allegedly took Jundal to visit Lakhvi in jail - India will see this as further evidence that the masterminds of 26/11 were able to move around freely and that arrests were purely symbolic.