Madani sent me to bomb-maker: LeT man

LeT’s South India commander Thadiyantavide Nazeer has told the Kerala Police that it was Islamist leader Abdul Nasser Madani who had first sent him to the terror group’s master bomb-maker, Abdul Sattar alias Sainuddin aka Sattar Bhai. He also told the police in Kannur that Sainuddin had trained him in the art of bomb-making.

Sainuddin, hailing from Kondotty in Muslim-majority Malappuram district of Kerala, is now in the custody of the Karnataka Police for his role in the 2008 Bangalore blasts. According to the police, it was Sainuddin, based then at Hyderabad, who had manufactured the explosives that went off in Bangalore. Nazeer revealed that it was LeT‘s Imam Ali who had taught Sainuddin to manufacture bombs. The training had taken place in Pakistan, he told the police.

The LeT man said that Madani, while he was in jail in connection with the Coimbatore serial blasts, had described the profile of Sainuddin to him and asked him to meet the bomb-maker. According to him, Madani and Sainuddin were known to each other for long. There were reports that Sufiya, wife of Madani and tenth accused in the terror case of bus-burning at Kalamassery, was the local guardian of Sainuddin’s daughter in Kochi.

According to sources, the LeT commander told the police that he had met Madani even after his release from the Coimbatore prison. Nazeer had met Madani at his headquarters in Anvarssery, Kollam with LeT’s Oman-based Malayalee fund-raiser Sarfaras Nawaz. He also said that they had an altercation with Madani after they criticized his decision to pursue the path of “peaceful politics”.

Nazeer told the interrogators headed by Kannur District Superintendent of Police Anup John Kuruvila and Special Investigation Team head KP Santhosh that it was Nawaz who had told him about the plan to carry out the blasts in Bangalore. Nawaz, who had mobilized the funds for the Bangalore blasts, was brought to India from Muscat early last year by officials of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). He was also 23rd accused in the case pertaining to recruitment of youths into the LeT.

The LeT had planned to take Mani alias Yusuf, who had volunteered to be Madani’s helper in the Coimbatore prison, to Kashmir for training. But this plan was dropped after Mani refused to go, he said. Four young men recruited by Nazeer and company from Kerala into the LeT were killed in an encounter with security forces in Kupwara, Kashmir in October, 2008 while trying to cross over to Pakistan.

The police also learned from Nazeer that Hyderabad was the operational base of the LeT in South India. Preliminary training for new recruits used to be given in Hyderabad. There was a Pakistan-based gang of the terror group, specializing in smuggling arms to Hyderabad. The gang was still active, but in other operations, with Karachi as base, he told the police.

Nazeer revealed that several of the accused in the terror cases in Kerala were now in the Gulf (the NIA has already got information about three such persons, accused in the case of the 2006 twin blasts in Kozhikode). He said he had helped several of them to escape to the Gulf. He told the police that he had also got help from several people, who were not named in any case, in the operations in Kerala.

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