Shift to Pakistan, ISI man urges terror suspect

A conversation between a Nepal-based suspected terrorist and an ISI operative in Karachi reveals how plotters of terror attacks in India are lured into shifting base to Pakistan. TOI has the transcript of a talk between the operative, Mohammad Shafi, who makes such an offer to Shamshul Huda, wanted by India for two strikes on rail tracks in 2016.

In the first, more than 150 people were killed when the Indore-Patna Express derailed near Kanpur, while in the second an improvised explosive device was recovered from the railway tracks in Ghorasahan in Bihar.

In the conversation intercepted by Indian agencies, Shafi, 50, urges Huda to flee to Pakistan. The talk is believed to have taken place in July 2016 from Shafi’s Pakistan number, +92 300237****, while he was in the UAE.

Shafi has so far been booked in India by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for supplying fake Indian currency notes (FICN). Separately, he has been mentioned in an NIA chargesheet as a mastermind in supplying foreign funds to his aides for planning or executing attacks on railway tracks in India.

Huda, who was arrested by the Nepal police in February last year, is wanted for the Ghorasahan terror case in which an IED fitted into a pressure cooker was found on the railway track on September 30, 2016. Six of his aides, working either as song-writers or scrap dealers in Bihar’s Motihari, were arrested by NIA and chargesheeted in October 2017.

According to an NIA chargesheet submitted before a special court in Patna, a copy of which is with TOI, Shafi and Huda plotted railway attacks in Malaysia. The chargesheet discloses how Huda visited Shafi in Karachi to plot “blasts in revenue offices (Malpote in Nepalese language)” in the districts like East Champaran which border Nepal.

“However, due to rainy season, and difficulty in planting IED due to the presence of a large number of people in offices, the idea was dropped and another conspiracy was hatched to plant IEDs on railway tracks and bridges to blow up passenger trains in order to disrupt the essential lines of transportation and to cause threat to security and integrity of India,” the chargesheet says.