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10 held in Spain & Thailand for 26/11 attacks

LONDON/MUMBAI: An international anti-terror operation netted seven people in Spain and three in Thailand between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning: all of those arrested allegedly worked with terror groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), in staging the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai that killed 166. The Mumbai Police Crime Branch said it was yet to receive any official word on the arrests but sources said that New Delhi was kept posted. Officers in Mumbai, though, clarified that those arrested could have helped the 26/11 terrorists procure fake identity cards of colleges in Bangalore and Hyderabad and picked up the tab for internet phone connections. In an email to TOI in London, the Spanish interior ministry said eight of the 10 arrested were Pakistanis. The suspects formed part of a group based in Thailand and linked to LeT. The Spanish interior ministry said the group stole passports ^ mostly from tourists in Barcelona ^ and sent those to Bangkok to be doctored and later distributed. The email added that the passports allowed members of terror outfits enter European and other countries. The two Pakistanis and the Thais based in Bangkok were the lynchpins of the illegal activity. Mumbai Police sources said they were not sure yet if the group members had paid for the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) connections used by the 26/11 terrorists and their Pakistani handlers. The Pakistanis held in Spain were identified as Junaid Humayun from Gujranwala, Atiqur Rehman of Lahore, Jabran Asghar and Malik Iftikhar Ahmad from Sialkot, Mohammad Saddique Khan Begum, alias Saddique, and Tanveer Arshad from Lahore. The Pakistanis are believed to have links with LeT and al-Qaida. The ones picked up in Thailand were identified as Muhammad Athar Butt and Zeeshan Ehsan Butt. The other individual picked up in Barcelona was a Nigerian - Babatunde Agunbiade - while the Thai national now behind bars in Bangkok is Sirikanlaya Kijbumrung. Anti-terror officers of the Spanish police acted on a tip-off and swooped on the suspects in and round Barcelona. They seized passports ready to be sent to Thailand and recovered computer and mobile telephone equipment. Preliminary reports said the arrested men had helped the 26/11 attackers sneak into Mumbai through the sea route. "They were part of the LeT's Thailand module,'' a Mumbai Police officer said. The Spanish police are still in the early stages of their investigations and security agencies in India said they needed to wait for more details. Investigators in Mumbai believe that these arrests would help them piece together the jigsaw of fake ID cards recovered from the slain terrorists. So far investigators have remained clueless on how they sourced these. Sources close to the investigation said LeT had taken utmost care to outsource aspects of the 26/11 operation. Documents were forged in Spain. Accounts were opened in New Jersey for VoIP phones and payments made from somewhere else. During the 58-hour siege of Mumbai, 284 calls running into 995 minutes, were made by the terrorists using mobile phones from the Taj Mahal Hotel, Oberoi-Trident and Nariman House to their handlers in Pakistan. These calls made over VoIP ^ a cheap way of making international calls. These were traced to an IP address created with Callphonex, a VoIP service provider based in New Jersey, US. Payments for these calls were made by opening an account in the name of one Kharak Singh from India. In reality, payments were made on two occasions by wire transfer through MoneyGram and Western Union Money Transfer by Pakistani nationals -- Javed Iqbal and Mohammed Ishtiaq. The duo, while communicating with Callphonex, used the e-mail id kharak_telco@yahoo.com.

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