Abu Jundal, the alleged handler of 26/11 terrorists, is fast turning out to be a treasure trove of information for the Indian investigators as he has further revealed that Mumbai attackers had undergone training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.
Indian media reports on Monday claimed that the startling disclosure made by Abu Jundal has for the first time established the Afghan link to the deadly 26/11 carnage. Jundal is believed to have informed the interrogators that the 26/11 terrorists were trained by hardcore al Qaeda militants at a Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LT) camp near the Pakistan-Iran border.
Jundal, the highest-ranking Indian commander of the LT, claimed there was a “great degree of coordination now between the LT, al Qaeda and even the Taliban”. These disclosures are part of Jundal’s interrogation report, details of which are being reported by the Indian media on a day-to-day basis. Jundal told a joint multi-agency team during sustained questioning that since LT did not want to leave anything to chance, it decided to rope in al Qaeda for training. The LT felt that hardcore al Qaeda terrorists could provide foolproof training to the module used to attack Mumbai. Initially, per reports, there were 22 to 25 militants in the group that was to attack Mumbai. However, since al Qaeda’s training was so intense that more than half of them dropped out and only 10 were selected for the final onslaught.
“Had all the 25 militants completed the training and made it to Mumbai the carnage would have been much worse,” a senior investigating official was quoted as saying. Finally, a module of 10 terrorist attacked Mumbai in what is viewed as the worst terror strike in independent India. Jundal claims that though he did visit LT’s training facility at the Pakistan-Iran border but he was not present during the time that the Mumbai module was undergoing training there. Indian investigating agencies asked Jundal to identify the exact location of this camp with help of Google map but Jundal failed to do so.
