National

Khalistan outfit rearing head?

NEW DELHI: While investigations are on to find out if any outfit espousing the “Khalistan” cause was behind Sunday’s blast inside a cinema hall in Ludhiana, intelligence agencies here had inputs about plans being made to create disturbances in Punjab.

The agencies recently discovered that Germany-based Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) militants had resumed contacts with their conduits operating in India. They suspect that Pakistan-based BKI chief Wadhawa Singh’s daughter Bhupinder Kaur and her husband Satnam Singh alias Surender who are based in Germany are supervising operations here.

Investigations in the past had revealed that the Germany-based militants and their accomplices had also been raising funds in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada for their “cause”. When Jagtar Singh Hawara, the BKI chief of operations in India, and several other members of the outfit were arrested by the Delhi police in 2005-06, the police found that huge sums of money was being pushed in through the hawala channel to re-establish the modules.

Based on these revelations, the Delhi police had then sent a letter rogatory to the German authorities seeking details of the calls that were made from there to the militants here. But they are yet to receive those details.

Through Jaspal Singh — the main accused in the May 2005 twin blasts at cinema halls in the Capital who was arrested along with his accomplice Vikas Sehgal and Hawara in June 2005 — the police also came to know that efforts were being made to rope in young men to revive militancy in Punjab. The Delhi police gave a list of suspected BKI militants to their Punjab counterpart and on that basis several arrests were made.

While the enforcement agencies are now trying to find if any BKI module is behind the Ludhiana blast, they are also investigating into the suspected role of another outfit, Khalistan Liberation Force. It is learnt that on September 2, a Punjab police team on a highway patrol duty intercepted a Maruti Esteem car for security check. The car driver, however, fled from the scene after abandoning the vehicle.

The police seized 3.5 kg of plastic explosive from that car. Further investigations revealed that the car was linked to Gurpreet Singh, son of KLF member Avtar Singh who was killed in an encounter with the police way back in 19

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