Lashkar supporters in lakhs: Tunda

Lashkar supporters in lakhs: Tunda Says LeT Currently Has 3L Active Members, Jaish-e-Mohammad Has 1.5L Neeraj Chauhan TNN  New Delhi: In what has left Indian intelligence agencies concerned, Lashkar-e-Toiba’s arrested bomber Abdul Karim Tunda has disclosed that the ranks of the jihadi outfit continues to swell in Pakistan and that LeT currently has 3 lakh active members. The support base of Jaish-e-Mohammad, another terror group active in Kashmir, is around 1.5 lakh, Tunda has claimed.     TOI exclusively accessed the full interrogation report of Abdul Karim Tunda, arrested by Delhi Police special Cell from close to the Nepal border last Friday, in which he gives details not only of Lashkar and its training camps, but also talks about other outfits and chiefs such as Azam Cheema, Amir Reza Khan and Abdul Salam Bhatki, an ideologue of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD).     The one-armed bombmaker has told interrogators that Hafiz Saeed, one of India’s most wanted jihadists, was promoted as Lashkar chief by Pakistan’s Inter-Services-Intelligence in the early nineties, when the Taliban were fighting to take control of Afghanistan. According to the interrogation report, LeT fighters are smuggled into India by Tunda’s father-in-law (from his second wife), Zakaria. An active LeT member, Zakaria also facilitates the crossing of absconders from India to Bangladesh.     Tunda claims to have known Hafiz Saeed since 1992, even before the Babri Masjid demolition. The first meeting between the two took place during Tunda’s 15-day visit to Pakistan to meet his brothers-in-law Gayasuddin and Abid. He came in contact with Saeed through a maulvi, Safi-Ur-Rehman, who hailed from Mubarakpur in Uttar Pradesh but was living in Mecca at that time. He and Saeed became good friends and the two met again in Pakistan later that year.     About the initial days of Lashkar, Tunda said two groups were separately formed out of LeT – Harkatul-Ansar and Harkat-ul-Jehad. However, on the directions of ISI and LeT, these groups were merged and given the name of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), with Maulana Masood Azhar as its founder member. “JeM was basically used by ISI for their operations,” according to the interrogation report.     Tunda said LeT has two major training centres in Mansera Subub Sarhad and Hind Baloch Subab Sarhad, while its other training centres are in Peshawar, Muzzafarabad and Muridke. Mostly recruits are from Punjab province in Pakistan and they are provided three kinds of training – daura-esufa (15-day training for collection of funds in the name of Kashmiri migrants), daura-e-aam (21-day physical and arms handling training, including firing) and daurae-khas (3-month training for operational activities). There are usually 30 to 70 members in a trainee group at one time.