Tuesday, January 20, 2009

The Indian magazine, Tehelka, has revealed the inefficiency of Indian intelligence agencies in its issue of Jan 17. It says that Indian agents had managed to penetrate the ranks of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and plant 35 SIM Indian cards with them. In other words, the SIM cards used by the Mumbai terrorists were like Trojan horses in the LeT ranks. But in a terrible communication and execution bungle the follow-up monitoring of the SIMs that should have taken place was not done. Mukhtar Ahmed, a police constable with the Jammu and Kashmir police who procured the SIM cards (used to infiltrate the LeT) has been arrested and jailed.

It is now evident that Indian intelligence agencies were aware that the Mumbai attacks were going to take place, and they might even have known the exact time of the attacks. The article assumes that they did not monitor the three phones using the SIM cards, but it is entirely possible that they did monitor them and deliberately allowed the incidents to take place. Pakistan should ask India to hand over the police constable Mukhtar Ahmed for interrogation.

Shakir Lakhani

Karachi

0 comments