20-05-2025
Killing of Lashkar's Razaullah Nizamani delivers justice for Bengaluru terror attack, 20 years on
Few witnesses even recalled seeing one of the two men raise his Kalashnikov assault rifle and open fire. Three people, including a pregnant woman, were injured in the 2005 attack. Munish Puri, a mathematics professor working at IIT-New Delhi, died on his way to a hospital.
Two men in combat fatigues walked over to the delegates as they shuffled out of the Tata Auditorium at the end of a long day's discussions on the role of operations research in infrastructure projects.
New Delhi: The white Ambassador car had pulled in through the gates of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru just as a conference was ending. 'This guy's managed to make it here just in time for dinner,' one of the delegates at the conference would later remember thinking.
This week, unidentified gunmen shot dead Razaullah Nizamani, the man who operated the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) cell that carried out the killings at IISc 20 years ago. For years, Nizamani helped organise cells of Lashkar jihadists operating outside of Kashmir, reporting to military commander Azam Cheema and top leader Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi.
For more than 15 years, two sources who spoke with Nizamani's friends in Pakistan told ThePrint, Nizamani lived in his family home in Matli, southwest of Hyderabad, the provincial capital of Sindh. Living off rents from family lands and a small business run by his children, he never discussed his past with neighbours or friends, the sources said.
Although the 56-year-old occasionally participated in events organised by the Milli Muslim League, set up by LeT to contest elections in 2007, Nizamani never fought elections, according to the sources. He was not among several high-profile Lashkar leaders who were detained after 26/11 and later prosecuted on terror financing charges.
Earlier this year, 'unidentified gunmen', accused by Pakistan of being agents of India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), gunned down Zia-ur-Rahman. He was one of over two dozen terrorists and former terrorists brought down in similar drive-by killings.
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The Deccan campaign
Late in 1999, Lashkar leaders Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi and Abdul Rehman Makki began two parallel efforts to set up terror networks that would target cities outside Kashmir. The organisation declared its intention at a February 2000 rally at its headquarters in Muridke, near Lahore, to 'liberate Hyderabad from Indian rule'. The Lashkar's supreme leader, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, also used the occasion to proclaim that Hyderabad and Junagadh were among its highest priorities.
Through the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, the Lashkar reached out to organised crime figures like Gujarat ganglord Rasool Khan 'Party' to identify recruits and arrange for their transport, according to the sources. Aftab Ansari, another organised crime figure reputed to have been radicalised in prison by British-born jihadist Syed Omar Sheikh, played a similar role.
A second thread of Lashkar recruitment, though, relied on recruitment among the Indian diaspora in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Through one-time Nalgonda resident Abdul Rehman, court documents show, the Lashkar recruited several Indian nationals to provide logistics and shelter for Pakistani jihadists who would operate in India. The group also raised funds which were used, among other things, to finance the IISc attack.
The operation also recruited over a dozen men from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, most notably Sabauddin Ahmad—who was arrested and convicted together with Maharashtra resident Fahim Arshad Ansari for multiple terror operations.
Fidayeen trained for the attack were provided by Azam Cheema, who routed them to Lashkar safe-houses in India through Kathmandu. Nizamani may have travelled to Nepal to help organise safehouses, intelligence sources said, but there is no robust evidence to back up the proposition. American scholar C. Christine Fair has noted Cheema was a prominent figure in the Lashkar's Kashmir operations, appearing publicly at commemorations for terrorists slain in India.
The terrorist who carried out the actual attack at IISc, though, was never identified. Zabiuddin Ansari, the Maharashtra-born Lashkar operative being tried for his alleged role in 26/11, said he attended the burial of the killer, code-named Abu Hamza, after he died of a protracted illness.
Ali Assham, a Maldives national whom Indian intelligence suspected to have also participated in the attack, was deported from Sri Lanka to Maldives in 2006. He was never prosecuted.
Five men, together with Abdul Rehman, received prison sentences for providing funds and logistics for the Lashkar as part of a plan to execute multiple bombings and fidayeen attacks in Bengaluru.
The RSS headquarters attack
Leading up to 26/11, Nizamani's name figured in investigations of an increasingly audacious series of attacks carried out on high-profile targets across India. In the summer of 2006, three Pakistani nationals—Afzal Ahmad and Bilal Ahmed Butta, both believed to be residents of Lahore, along with Muhammad Usman from Gujranwala—attempted to stage an attack on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's headquarters in Nagpur.
The men were armed with assault rifles, police records seen by ThePrint show, as well as Arges grenades, licenced-manufactured at a Pakistan ordnance factory that supplies its military.
Intelligence Bureau (IB) operatives, who government sources told ThePrint had successfully infiltrated the operation, also discovered that the men had a notebook containing several telephone numbers of Lashkar commanders. A phone number used by Nizamani was among them.
The Lashkar's plan, Indian intelligence officials believe, was to ship weapons and explosives to the multiple cells that Nizamani helped operate, enabling them to stage independent operations. In April 2005, though, the Maharashtra Police intercepted a massive weapons cache, which included 24 kg of RDX, along with grenades, assault rifles and ammunition, all shipped from Karachi in fishing boats.
Following the failure of multiple operations involving Indian operatives, the Lashkar is believed to have decided to stage 26/11 using only its Pakistani cadre to avoid penetration by India's intelligence services.
Nizamani and other mid-level Lashkar personnel involved in the Indian operations were likely kept out of the planning of 26/11, an intelligence officer familiar with the case said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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