Public places, tourist spots were on radar

Seven years after its agents directly waged a war against the India, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) on its own, was poised to rear its head yet again.

Seven years after its agents directly waged a war against the India, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) on its own, was poised to rear its head yet again.

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The two LeT operatives, whom sources identified as Ehtesaan and Safaqat - both in their early 20s and of Kashmiri-origin - had surveyed five of Capital's most-crowded markets and sought succour in imitating Osama Bin Laden himself, sources claimed.

"A memory card, usable both in a USB drive as well as in a mobile phone, which has been recovered from the duo shows one of them firing an AK-47, a Laden's most publicised image," said a senior police officer.

"It also contains videos, apparently downloaded from YouTube, which illustrate how to assemble a crude bomb. Another video shows one of the men assembling an IED within minutes," he adds.

One of the arrested, the police claimed, had gone to Pakistan on valid travel papers and was trained in handling heavy arms and assembling small improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in December last year only to return in early January 2012.

The LeT's first direct attack on Delhi was a series of strikes perpetrated across crowded Delhi markets on October 29, 2005, which had claimed 62 lives. Since then, sources said, more than 50 LeT operatives, including people of Pakistani-origin, have been arrested.

"Throughout last seven years, the LeT had kept itself away from action and had concentrated solely on providing logistical and financial support to other outfits such as IM," said the officer.

"We have recovered maps of the city and some notes on five to six popular markets with details about their entry and exit points from the duo," the officer said.

One of them was arrested from south Delhi's Tughlakabad Extension while the other was arrested by the Jharkhand Police after being tipped-off by their counterparts in Delhi.

Sources said that three more persons, all students from Kashmir, had been picked up by the police from southeast Delhi's Govindpuri area for questioning.

Meanwhile, Delhi Police commissioner BK Gupta has confirmed that public places and tourist spots were on their radar. At least two more arrests, Gupta said, were likely to be made in the case in the coming days.