Terror brush for India?s tech hub

Mysore police arrest two Pak militants planning to bomb a state secretariat extension, reports BR Srikanth.

Two Pakistani militants who were planning to bomb the Vikasa Soudha, an extension of the state secretariat, were arrested on Friday. Fahad Hai, 24, and Ali Hussain, 25, were caught in Mysore, 160 km away.

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They are said to belong to the Al-Badr Foundation, one of the terrorist groups active in Jammu and Kashmir. Karnataka Home Minister MP Prakash said: "The central intelligence agencies had tipped us off."

When a police patrol tried to stop the militants travelling on a moped near Vijayanagar extension in Mysore, the pillion rider opened fire. They were overpowered only after police fired back.

According to police, Fahad hails from Karachi and is a postgraduate in analytical chemistry. He has some training in making explosives. Hussain in contrast is a school dropout, who ran errands and carried cash for the more important Al-Badr operatives.

The two had been running a cosmetics store and an STD booth in Mysore for the past eight months without being detected, said Director General of Police BS Sial. They stayed in a rented room in Mysore.

The police have seized two AK47 rifles and a pistol from them, apart from a laptop, cellphones, CDs and a satellite phone. The laptop contained detailed diagrams of bombs and route maps of Mysore and Bangalore.