Mumbai was the target

6 LeT men held in UP, blasts planned at BSE, Churchgate station

LUCKNOW: The Uttar Pradesh police claim to have foiled a major terror strike against Mumbai with the arrest of six Lashkar-e-Taiba men on Sunday. Three of them were arrested in Lucknow and the others from Rampur.

Police claim the six were on their way to Mumbai to engineer blasts at the Bombay Stock Exchange, Churchgate station and other places. Pakistani passports, a pistol, grenades, AK-47s, explosives and maps of Mumbai were recovered.

This module was involved in the CRPF camp attack at Rampur on January 1, and the one on Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in December 2005 when a scientist was killed, UP police chief Vikram Singh told reporters.

Suhail and Arshad Ali alias Baba (residents of UP) and Faheem, a Pakistani national were arrested from a state roadways bus in Rampur from where they were planning to go to Mumbai.

Salahuddin, from Madhubani in Bihar, and Imran and Farooq — residents of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) — were arrested from Charbagh taxi stand in Lucknow.  

“The terrorists were planning to go to Mumbai to target some prominent and crowded places including Churchgate and the stock exchange building,” Singh, adding that railway tickets to Mumbai were recovered from them.

Convoys of the Indian Army in Bareilly and Rampur (Central Command) were also on the militants’ target, Singh said.

Sallahuddin was allegedly the mastermind of the attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur on January 1, the DGP said. It was executed by Suhail, Arshad and the two militants from PoK, Imran and Farooq.

According to the police, the two PoK residents were trained to act as suicide attackers while the other two provided cover to them. The militants told the police during interrogation that one of the attackers, suspected to have received a bullet injury, was in fact hit by a splinter from a grenade that was thrown by him at the CRPF camp.

The arrested militants were moving in two groups and their next destination was Mumbai where Faheem had already hired a room. The DGP claimed that they had revealed that they were “awaiting final instructions from across the border” about the date, time and precise targets.

The arrested militants were paraded before the press and admitted before the media that they were indeed planning to target Mumbai, the country’s economic capital once again.