By Sahil Makkar, IANS
New Delhi : With security agencies foiling their attempt to abduct a prominent Indian leader, militants of the terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) may be planning yet another strike, a top official has said on the basis of intelligence inputs.
“Intelligence inputs and excerpts suggest that after failing in their plan to kidnap a prominent politician, the JeM militants are again hatching a similar conspiracy,” the official said.
“We are expecting that this time they will try to strike their target with a fully designed and detailed plan. It has been learnt that their immediate target would be some VVIPS and their kins,” the official added.
“Their link between recent serial blasts in three cities of Uttar Pradesh (that killed at least 13 people and injured 40) can also be not ruled out,” the official told IANS on condition of strict anonymity.
The official said security agencies were well aware of their movements in advance.
“Security agencies had knowledge in advance about their movements. But nobody knew whom they would target,” the official said, adding that all concerned agencies have been put on high alert regarding their plans.
A few days ago, three JeM terrorists, who were arrested from the outskirts of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, had revealed on news channels their plans to abduct Congress leader and MP Rahul Gandhi.
The terrorists, all said to be from Pakistan, were identified as Abid alias Faate, Yusuf alias Faisal and Mirza Rashid Baig. They were arrested with two AK-47 assault rifles, three Chinese pistols, five kg of RDX and 16 detonators besides a huge cache of ammunition.
The trio disclosed that during the course of their training in Pakistan for the job, they were shown video clippings of public meetings and functions and movements of Rahul Gandhi. They also gave out a detailed plan of how they were trained to get access to Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son.
“Our plan was to kidnap Rahul Gandhi during one of his visits to Uttar Pradesh,” Abid, one of the terrorists, was shown as saying in the “confessional tapes”.
According to the tapes, the terrorists had planned to demand the release of 42 JeM terrorists jailed in different parts of India in a swap for the young Amethi MP after he would be taken hostage.
But days after the arrests, the Intelligence Bureau officials refuted all such claims about the alleged conspiracy to abduct Rahul Gandhi.
“I fail to understand how the Uttar Pradesh cops jumped to their own conclusions within hours of the terrorists’ arrest on Nov 16,” a senior IB official had told select mediapersons in Lucknow.
The official saw “political expediency rather than merit” behind the kidnap theory.
Uttar Pradesh police chief Vikram Singh clarified, “We never made this announcement about Rahul Gandhi being a target of the terrorists. We simply maintained that they had plans to abduct some Uttar Pradesh-based VVIP politician. The part about Gandhi was added by the media.”
Asked about the on-camera confession of the trio telecast by a TV channel a day after their arrests in which they spoke in detail about a plan to abduct Gandhi, Singh said: “We would not like to be guided by such confessions either. For all you know, the terrorists might have given out certain names to confuse investigating agencies.”
The JeM gained notoriety after its role in hijacking the Indian Airlines plane IC-814 in 1999, in carrying out the attack on the Indian parliament, killing of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and an attack on the Jammu and Kashmir assembly.