We got training in Pak, PoK: Kasab

“There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps organised by Laskar-e-Toiba (LeT) at Mansehra and Muzzarafabad. Ten of us were later handpicked for the Mumbai operation,’’ said Ajmal Amir Kasab during interrogations. According to sources, Kasab, 21, the only terrorist arrested by the Mumbai police, told his interrogators that Abdul Rahman, an ex-soldier popularly called Chacha, had given them training. Mansehra is in North-West Frontier Province and Muzzafarabad in PoK. The sources said Kasab explained that the training was divided into seven phases. “He said the first phase was of ‘very hard physical training’ of three months which included running 10 to 15 km. The next three months were for marine training like swimming, surfing, diving and boating in high seas. The rest included arms and ammunition training,’’ said a source. After the training was over, they were sent to Mumbai for a”short internship’’, Kasab is believed to have told the cops. This was the period when the accused did the reccee of the city and even went to the five star hotels (Taj and Oberoi), the sources said. Sources said the Mumbai operation plot was planned in Karachi some six months ago. Joint commissioner of police (crime) Rakesh Maria said,``We are closely working with the all the central agencies who have earlier handled such situations.’’In a fresh development in the investigations, the Mumbai police called up their Gujarat counterparts to enquire about whether the terrorists used Amar Narayan, the skipper of the fishing trawler used by them, as a mole. Narayan was detained by Pakistan for three months for illegally entering into the Pak waters.Police are now taking the help of top technical experts to break into the details of the GPS system and the sattelite phone which they recovered from a terrorist at the Taj hotel. This GPS helped them to navigate the sea route from Karachi to Mumbai via Porbander, cops said. The police have launched a manhunt for the few locals who have given the terrorists logistic support in the operation. LeT members learnt Hindi before attacks Lashker-e-Taiba, which carried out the most audacious terror strikes in Mumbai, has for the first time used Hindi words while conveying their threat message through media houses. Interestingly, the mail, sent in the name of Deccan Mujahideen, was generated from an email account created in Russia but was used by a computer based in Pakistan, officers investigating the pieces of the November 26 attack said. The author of the mail had used voice recognition software to dictate the mail which would type it in Devnagri font. Officials handling counter-insurgency operations in the country said that militants had not only for the first time used Hindi language but also made the mail jump from one server to another. Experts say that the e-mail, claiming responsibility for Wednesday’s terror attacks, was first generated on a computer located in Pakistan. Analysing the internet protocol addresses used to send the mail, the experts found that the Russia based e-mail address used to send the document was opened early on November 26 was opened by a computer user in Pakistan.