Ishrat part of 'failed' LeT Commander Muzammil's team: sources

Bengaluru: The proscribed Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), which had masterminded the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai that had claimed the lives of 166 people, had appointed its army chief Muzammil Bhat, the over six-foot-tall bearded man, as its commander for South India operations.

The LeT reportedly stripped Muzammil of his portfolio after his “test run” and the “key” India module, comprising Ishrat Jahan and Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Gulam Sheikh, “botched” up and ended up dead in an alleged police encounter.

“Ishrat was an alleged member of Muzammil’s LeT module and was radicalised and converted to jihad by her friend and accomplice Javed at the behest of Muzammil. She was reportedly caught in the terror web by Javed,” said an officer on condition of anonymity.

The 26/11 accused Daood Gilani alias David Coleman Headley had reportedly told the team of National Investigation Agency (NIA) officers, who had interrogated him in 2010 in the Chicago prison, that Ishrat was recruited and converted to terrorism by Sheikh.

In their report, the NIA had quoted Headley in paragraph 168, in which he allegedly stated that in late 2005, the top LeT leader Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi had introduced Muzammil (Bhat) to him as a Lashkar commander, whose every big ‘project’ had ended in failure. He had added that Ishrat Jahan module was also one of Muzammil’s ‘botched up’ operations.

“While the top LeT commanders, Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi directly coordinated the 2008 Mumbai serial terror attacks with the support of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Muzammil was instructed to plan terror attacks in South India. The LeT took away that role from him after Ishrat along with Javed, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar was killed on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in an alleged shootout with the police on June 15, 2004,” the officer said.