Against the backdrop of the Delhi Police recovering large quantity of explosives from the house of a suspected IS operatives in Uttar Pradesh, it has come to light that the Ministry of Home Affairs had warned of terror modules of religious fundamentalists, backed by Pakistan intelligence, to trigger blasts in one of the cities in India.
Acting on intelligence inputs, the MHA issued an alert to all States two days before the Independence Day celebrations that members of some banned outfits had planned to cause IED blasts in Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal and some other places in the north-east along the Indo-Myanmar and Indo-Bangladesh border, police sources told The Hindu on Sunday.
The MHA also relied on interception of a conversation between two foreign agents who quoted a Pakistan-based source as saying that “something big is being planned in one the cities in India,” the sources said.
The alert said Pakistan’s ISI and handlers stationed in other places had tasked some absconding gangsters to vitiate the communal atmosphere in Punjab while another input detailed Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Bangladesh, plan to trigger low-intensity blasts in West Bengal. JMB chief Salahuddin Salehin was reported to have visited a number of places in West Bengal and Jharkhand in March-April 2020.
Another banned organisation, Sahadat-e-al-Hikma was also reported to have been involved in imparting training to some radicalised youth in Mushirabad, Uttar Dinajpur and Burdwan in West Bengal to cause explosions along the Indo-Bangla border.
It also pointed to the camping of about 10-12 terrorists of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba organisations in a Pakistan village close to the border with a plan to infiltrate into India and create “disturbances”, the sources said.