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Vipin Agnihotri Pakistani agents have found a fertile recruiting place in Bangladesh and they have found it convenient to make them work in Uttar Pradesh. With its large Muslim population, when the perpetrators of terror escape the brunt of the suspicion is borne by the law abiding sections of the population. This creates tensions within the Muslim population as the uncalled for attention by the intelligence agencies and fellow citizens is understandably resented. Uttar Pradesh with India's largest Muslim population has been the hub of Islamic terrorist outfits and post 9/11, the State witnessed a tremendous increase in terror activities, be it Ayodhya Temple attack or the Varanasi blasts. The State is a haven for all the major terrorist outfits like LeT, SIMI, HuM, JeM and ISI. In demographically oversized and politically vibrant Uttar Pradesh, the terror think tank has been busy with sinister ideas. Post 9/11, there have been two major terror strikes in UP, both hitting the religious sensitivity of Hindus. The perpetrators - Pak outfits - hoped to translate these into communal hatred, threaten the brittle secular fabric of society and thereby destabilise. The most menacing attack came at Ayodhya on July 5, 2005. Luckily, the Fidayeen attack was foiled by alert security that eliminated the five executors, all Pakistanis, in a fierce gun battle. A year later came the serial blasts in Varanasi on March 6, 2006 killing 21. Once again, the police prevented the situation from assuming communal colour. Besides the two incidents, Islamic terror modules carried out blasts at Gorakhpur and in a general compartment of the Shramjeevi Express. Intelligence inputs have been hyper about the growing sleeper cells in UP. But political considerations have kept the Governments from taking heed and cleansing the menace.The results were soon to some. The Students SIMI got into act and first detonated an explosion at the Sabarmati Express at Faizabad and then near the Vidhan Bhawan in Lucknow around the Independence Day in 2000. The biggest challenge before the UP security agencies as on date is that interrogation of some arrested militants and agents of Pakistan espionage agency ISI have confessed that there were more than 200 sleeping modules of hardcore militant groups in the State. For the time being, the biggest pain in the neck for Intelligence and security agencies have been the nascent Bangladeshi franchise of Terror Inc, HUJI. After the armed forces and intelligence agencies tightened the screws in the western frontier, our unfriendly neighborhood Pakistan hit upon the idea of tapping the hard line and ill-fed elements in Bangladesh. The identified militant outfits JeM, LeT slowed down their activities and outsourced the terror tasks to the HUJI by providing them all logistic support. Unfortunately, local support for these outlawed units has been rather to come by. A case in point is that of Saharanpur-based Dr Irfan who helped the JeM modules to reach Ayodhya and execute the plan. In case of Sankatmochan blasts too, Pesh Imam Waliullah of Allahabad helped the HUJI activists. He and five others including two from Lucknow were later netted for their complicity. On December 28, 2006, the STF arrested two ISI agents, Pak nationals Abdul Sakur and Adeel Anjum. While the former resided in Kaiserbagh and had procured a ration card, the later was residing in Kutch, Gujarat where he managed to get a passport. Another Pakistani Lareb Khan, arrested last year in Lucknow, was also a part of a ISI module. After his arrest he initially identified himself as an Indian and was running a placement agency near IT College. Over the years several harbingers have been netted from Udham Singh Nagar, Uttarakhand and several districts of UP including state capital Lucknow. Intelligence reports and arrests of militants by state police have been revealing from time to time that Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi top the hit list of terrorist outfits. Significantly, Lucknow has been a transit point for terrorists since long. For example, Athrudin, the prime accused in Red Fort shootout in New Delhi, in 2000, had connections in the city and was regularly in touch with his Lucknow associates through a PCO in Chaupatia locality. In addition, two LeT men were arrested from Chinhat locality on May 13, 2004 along with an AK-56 rifle, five kg explosives, two detonators, two magazines and large amount of ammunitions as well as incriminating documents and maps. Ishrat and Javed, the two LeT members, who were gunned down in Gujarat in April 2004, had visited and stayed in the city several times reportedly with an to aim to carry out a major operation in the city, but changed their plans at the last moment. On that occasion also, there were reports that LeT was particularly interested in Ayodhya. Two LeT terrorists were held from the Cantonment area of the city on May 22, 2005. | |
