By IANS,
Mumbai: An American national informed a Mumbai Special Court Friday that the mobile phones used by the 26/11 terrorists to contact their handlers in Pakistan were of Chinese origin.
The witness, working as Nokia Inc. Finland’s enforcement manager in the US, deposed through video-conferencing from the office of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She was not named.
She said the mobile handsets were produced in the company’s China unit and shipped to Pakistan in June 2008, five months before the Mumbai terror attacks.
She also told Special Judge M. L. Tahilyani that the Mumbai police had recovered five Nokia phones from the nine slain terrorists.
The FBI had helped to determine the origins of these phones, which were identified on the basis of the International Mobile Equipment Identification number, she added.
“It is a unique identification number allotted to each mobile phone manufactured by Nokia,” the witness explained.
The FBI had earlier informed Mumbai Police that the mobile phones were shipped to Nokia dealers United Mobile and Twelve Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd in Pakistan.
She became the third US national to depose as a witness in the ongoing trial of Mumbai terror attacks and established the Pakistani link to the attacks.
Earlier, a forensic expert of the FBI told the special court that the terrorists had used global position systems (GPS) to reach Mumbai from Karachi by the Arabian Sea route.
Another witness, from Yamaha company, said that the terrorists had used his company’s outboard engine in their inflatable rubber dingy to sail to the bay at Colaba that night.
Though the Nokia manager did not have knowledge of the transaction between China and Pakistan, she could confirm from the company’s records in the US that the consignment was shipped from China to Pakistan in June 2008.
Replying to a query of Judge Tahaliyani, the Nokia manager said the database “could be accessed by any Nokia office in the world”, if they had the password given by the company.