Another Alarming Blimp On The Radar Screen

As leader of the Asif Raza Commando Force, Ansari was reportedly taking revenge for the death of his associate, Asif Raza Khan alias Rajan, who died in a "police encounter" in Rajkot on December 7 last year. "Your police and the Rajkot police got together to kill Rajan. They had no reason to kill him," was what Ansari rang up to tell the police from his hideout in Dubai, hours after the attack. Another possible motive behind the attack, say the police, could be that Ansari was trying to assert his prominence in a gang in disarray, especially after Asif’s killing.

Khan, a resident of Calcutta’s Park Circus area, was arrested in Delhi in September 2001 for an attempted attack on the city’s police commissioner, Ajai Raj Sharma. He had reportedly played a key role in the abduction of the director of a footwear company, Partha Roy Burman, from Calcutta in July last year and released him after extorting a ransom of around Rs 4 crore. Earlier, he was involved in the kidnappings of Bhaskar Parikh, son of Gujarat jeweller B. Parikh and filmstar Govinda’s relative Jayanti Lal. "Among the 60 people detained by the police after the terrorist attack is Altaf Raza Khan, the younger brother of Asif Raza Khan," says a senior IB official.

RAW and IB sleuths confirm that Aftab Ansari was associated with the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami (HuJI), which has offices in Bangladesh and Karachi in Pakistan. The HuJI and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the two outfits which had links with the Taliban in Afghanistan, merged in October 1993 to form the Harkat-ul-Ansar. After the Harkat-ul-Ansar was blacklisted and banned by the US government, the HuJI re-established itself in October 1997.

"We know that Ansari used the terrorist network (HuJI) to get weapons, which he paid for through the extortion money," says an IB official. In fact, Indian investigators intercepted two caches of arms from Haryana and Gujarat last year from operatives of the Asif Raza Commando Force which was sent by Ansari in Karachi. Intelligence reports also indicate that Ansari managed to obtain a Pakistani passport and settled in Dubai only in March 2000, from where he plans his operations.

Meanwhile, investigators are also trying to find out Ansari’s connection with Omar Sheikh and Maulana Masood Azhar, both of whom were released during the IC-814 hijack in Kandahar in January 2000. There’s evidence to suggest that the three met in Rawalpindi after their release to chalk out further plans. "We’ve asked the US authorities to help us in this matter," says a senior intelligence official. North Block officials have also got in touch with the authorities in Dubai to check the authenticity of the phone calls made by Ansari and his possible whereabouts. There has been no word from Dubai so far but the home ministry’s special secretary, Ashok Bhandari, said that the police were moving in the right direction. Ansari has threatened to focus his attention now on Delhi and Rajkot. That is something which worries the counter-intelligence machinery.