New Delhi: The extradition of Tahawwur Rana from the US to India was probably one of the biggest milestones where the probe into the Mumbai 26/11 attack is concerned, and he is being questioned by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) with the current focus on the terrorist outrage, but likely to expand to his role in other incidents.
Rana has confirmed his role in the attacks and told the agency that he had provided all support to David Headley during his visits to India to carry out the reconnaissance of the targets that were hit on that fateful night.
Rana, during his questioning, has provided many details relating to his role and also the planning that took place in the run-up to the attack.
An official part of the probe said that the current focus is on the 26/11 attack, but they would also be looking into the possibility of Rana being part of other attacks in the country.
One of the key angles that the agencies would be looking into is the visits to other parts of the country that Rana made. Rana has admitted that he was in Mumbai at the time of the attack; the agencies are trying to ascertain what his agenda was when he also visited various other parts of the country during the same period.
During his India trip, Rana did not confine himself just to Mumbai. He also visited several other places in North and South India, an official said.
Another official said that, like David Headley, Rana too was in constant contact with Ilyas Kashmiri, the then chief of Al Qaeda’s 313 Brigade. The several conversations that both Rana and Headley would have with Kashmiri were related to the ambitious Ghazwa-e-Hind project, which means the destruction of India.
During one such conversation, Kashmiri told Rana that he specifically wants youth from Kerala to be recruited in large numbers for this project. Kashmiri, however, also added that Rana needed to recruit from across the country, and this explains his visits to Kochi, Agra, Delhi, Hapur, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai.
According to investigators, these visits were made between November 13 and November 21, 2008. The NIA would dig deeper into Rana’s visits to these places.
Officials say that Rana may have been laying the groundwork for the larger plan that was set in motion by Kashmiri. Not too many details about this big plan have come out as yet since the NIA is currently focusing entirely on the 26/11 probe.
“It is important that we build a water-tight case so that the Pakistan establishment and its role in the attack are completely exposed,” an official added.
Among all the places that Rana visited, the agencies are looking more in detail regarding his visit to Kochi. Another official confirmed that his visit to Kerala had nothing to do with a reconnaissance mission.
Rana, unlike Headley, was not trained to carry out such a mission. During his visit to Kerala, he told the people he met that he was an immigration consultant. His attempts to set up fronts in Kerala in a bid to recruit people are currently under the scanner.
Further, the agencies have learnt that he had even put up advertisements in local newspapers inviting people seeking visas to both the United States and Canada. An Intelligence Bureau official said that Rana was probably trying to create a cover so that he could get a lot of people under one umbrella and then attempt to recruit them.
Kerala was also a preferred destination for Kashmir, as for the first time, an exception relating to the battle in Kashmir was made for cadres from this state.
In Jammu and Kashmir, the ISI always recruits locals or deploys Pakistanis to carry out terror attacks. In 2013, a court convicted 13 persons after they were found guilty of recruiting terrorists for camps in Kashmir. In 2008, four persons from the state were killed in an encounter in Kashmir. Incidentally, this was the first time that the Lashkar-e-Taiba recruited non-Pakistanis and non-Kashmiris to wage a battle in Jammu and Kashmir. Officials say that details relating to Rana’s larger plan, other than the 26/11 attack, are currently sketchy.
Once the Mumbai probe is completed, the rest of his agenda would be looked into, the official also added.
(IANS)
