Pakistani jihadi organisations, which joined the International Islamic Front (IIF) formed by Osama Bin Laden in February 1998 either immediately on its formation or thereafter, have been active in India since 1993. The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) is a founding member of the IIF and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) joined the IIF thereafter.
Al Qaeda itself, as an organisation, had not come to notice in the past for any presence or activities either in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) or other parts of India. However, in 1999, there were unconfirmed reports of Al Qaeda having cased one of the US Consulates in India for a possible terrorist strike. The ground work for this was alleged to have been done not from Pakistan, but from Bangladesh, possibly through the local branch of the HUJI, identified by the US as HUJI (B).
When Abu Zubaidah, then projected as the operational chief of Al Qaeda, was arrested at Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab in March 2002, sections of the Pakistani media had reported that he had done a training course in a computer training institute in Pune in India before crossing over into Pakistan and joining Al Qaeda. It is not known when he did this course, for how long he had stayed in India and who were his other contacts in India.
The report of the US National Commission, which had enquired into the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US, refers to a visit made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the reported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist strikes, to India, when he was operating from Karachi. According to the report, after bin Laden had shifted to Afghanistan from the Sudan in 1996, KSM had visited him there and thereafter travelled to India, Indonesia and Malaysia, where he met Hambali, reportedly the operational chief of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), who is now in US custody.
The Commission's report does not give any other details of KSM's visit to India in 1996. From a perusal of the report, it is evident that the USA's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had shared with the Commission only sanitised summaries of the interrogation reports of KSM and others, but not the full texts. It is, therefore, possible, that the full texts available with the US intelligence agencies might contain more details of KSM's visit to India. Was he merely transiting through India on his way to South-East Asia or did he come here to explore the possibility of establishing sleeper cells of Al Qaeda for possible future use?
There is another reference in the report, which has since come to have some relevance to India. The report says on Page150