Author: Sayantan Chakravarty
Publication: India Today
Date: February 24, 2003
Introduction: Over 14 months, the
Pakistan High Commission's staff strength has come down from 110 to 46.
Indian counter-terrorism bodies still aren't satisfied.
As intelligence tip-offs go, this
one was red hot. It came early on the morning of February 6 to the Delhi
Police's Special Cell. The next few hours were dramatic. They served to
establish that the Pakistani High Commission in the heart of the Indian
capital had become a den of espionage and subversion. They were also to
cost Jalil Abbas Jilani, Pakistan's acting high commissioner, his job.
That may be getting ahead of a story
which, really, took off at about 11 a.m. on February 6 and only a few metres
away from the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi's Chanakyapuri area. A
team from the Special Cell watched as a woman with a handbag got out of
a taxi and walked into the high commission. When she emerged an hour later,
curiously enough, she was carrying two bags. Slung across her shoulder
was a black leather bag.
Another taxi, summoned by the mission,
arrived to take her away. Police intercepted the taxi. Within minutes the
woman- identified as Anjum Zamrooda Habib, a government schoolteacher from
Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir-began to sing.
She had just been handed over Rs
3 lakh by Jilani and was to fly back to Srinagar with the cash. The police
recovered an Indian Airlines ticket from her. Habib said she was going
to distribute the money among sundry terrorist groups operating in the
Kashmir Valley. She had called on Jilani at the behest of Abdul Ghani Bhatt,
the distinctly pro-Pakistan chairman of the All Party Hurriyat Conference
(APHC), the chief separatist political collective in the state.
Habib was even carrying a diary
with the names of the groups that were to receive the money. When he had
read the diary and heard out Habib, Joint Commissioner of Police (Special
Cell) Neeraj Kumar, who oversaw the entire operation, was convinced of
his case. "The high commission," Kumar later said, "has been indulging
in activities that can only be described as nefarious and subversive."
As Habib began to talk, the police
also arrested Shabir Ahmed Dar, the regular liaison man between the Hurriyat
and the Pakistani mission. From his south Delhi residence, Dar ran the
Kashmir Awareness Bureau. North Block officials suspect otherwise. "The
bureau," one top Home Ministry bureaucrat says, "was only a front. It did
little else other than collect terror funds from the Pakistani mission."
Recovered from Dar was Rs 2 lakh
in cash. According to Habib's confession, this money too had come from
Jilani. Both Habib and Dar were charged under the Prevention of Terrorism
Act (POTA). A Delhi court remanded them in police custody for 10 days.
Meanwhile Kumar had sent a detailed
report to both the Home Ministry and the Foreign Office. The repercussions
were quick and cutting. The Government expelled Jilani immediately. Pakistan
resorted to a tit-for-tat, throwing out Sudhir Vyas, India's acting high
commissioner in Islamabad. Diplomatic relations are at their lowest ebb
since 1947.
ESPIONAGE DIARIES
1998
Total registered cases: 5
Direct mission role: 1
Arrested: 6 Indians from Ambala,
Meerut, Delhi, Gurdaspur. Included policemen and an armyman from Agra cantonment.
Recovery: Classified defence documents.
1999
Total registered cases:11
Direct mission role: 3
Arrested: 4 Pakistanis, 29 Indians
from Delhi, Kanpur, Mumbai, Pune, Sahibabad, Kolkata, Siwan, Meerut.
Recovery: Secret papers, including
for Chandipur.
2000
Total registered cases: 19
Direct mission role: 4
Arrested: 8 Pakistanis, 35 Indians,
4 other nationals from Jaipur, Jodhpur, Delhi, Amritsar, Ahmednagar, Jhansi,
Lucknow, Darjeeling, Roorkee. Included dismissed major.
Recovery: Air base maps.
2001
Total registered cases: 17
Direct mission role: 2
Arrested: 4 Pakistanis, 22 Indians,
2 other nationals from Jaipur, Mandi, Lucknow, Barmer, Kolkata, Visakhapatnam,
Delhi, Varanasi, Batala, Gurdaspur, Jaisalmer, Jaipur.
Recovery: Secret papers.
2002
Total registered cases: 35
Direct mission role: 6
Arrested: 8 Pakistanis, 65 Indians,
3 others from Sriganganagar, Hyderabad, Delhi, Alwar, Kanpur, Ludhiana,
Jaipur, Bulandshahr, Srinagar, Gwalior, Bijnore, Noida, Shillong, Mathura,
Bhavnagar, Muzaffarnagar, Aligarh, Rajkot, Katni, Siliguri.
Recovery: Secret papers.
2003
Total registered cases: 1
Direct mission role: 1
Arrested: 2 Indians from Delhi.
Include Hurriyat activists with direct contacts with Pakistan- based terrorist
outfits like JKLF, JeM, LeT, HM, Al Badr.
Recovery: Rs 5 lakh
