Date:04/08/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/08/04/stories/2008080454350100.htm

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Lashkar tech expert identified as son of Pakistan official

Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI: A top Lashkar-e-Taiba electronic communications specialist, tasked with setting up a high-technology communications hub, has been identified as the son of a senior Pakistani science bureaucrat.

Sikandar Azam, an Islamabad-trained engineer who the Lashkar assigned to set up an encrypted cyber-communication facility in the Thanamandi forests of the frontier district of Rajouri, was arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir Police last month.

Azam’s father, Mohammad Khalid Bhat, works as Additional Director of Administration and Accounts at Pakistan’s Ministry of Science and Technology. He is resident of the Gulistan Plaza in Islamabad’s Sector G-10.

Police sources said a Rajouri-based Lashkar commander — so far identified only by the code names Azasa Shah and Abu Huzaifa —called for the setting up of the new communications hub in the wake of the recent interdiction of several of the organisation’s cross-Line of Control infiltrating groups.

‘Abu Huzaifa,’ who commands a sector critical to the Lashkar’s cross-border operations, believed these losses were the outcome of successful Indian electronic intelligence operations.

On the orders of the Lashkar’s headquarters in Pakistan, Azam flew into Dhaka in mid-July, and then made his way across the India-Bangladesh border to a Lashkar safe house in Lalgola, near Murshidabad.

Thanamandi residents Khalid-ul-Haq and Shafiq Ahmad picked him up there, and the three men then travelled back by train to Jammu, through Rishikesh. Abu Huzaifa himself, however, succeeded in escaping a botched June 20 raid on his safe house which followed this successful intelligence-led operation.

Along with three bodyguards, Abu Huzaifa succeeded in shooting his way through a poorly-laid security force cordon at Jarh Wali, near the shrine-town of Shahdara Sharif; 43 Rashtriya Rifles officer Major Bhanu Partap, and Jammu and Kashmir Police Special Operations Group Havaldar Anjeev Rana lost their lives in the shootout.