LeT members admit role in Bengaluru blasts

The two Lashker-e-Tayiba militants, who were handed over to Indian authorities by Bangladesh, have confessed to their involvement in the serial blasts that rocked Bengaluru last year, a top police official said on Thursday.

Nazir Tarian Dabede, 25, alias T Nazir told interrogators of the Meghalaya police and the Border Security Force that he had planted the bombs along with a person called Rahim, the official said.

Nazir, a bomb expert, and LeT operative Siraj Shamshudeen Shamas, 33, hail from Kerela. They were handed over to the BSF by the Bangladesh Rifles on Wednesday. The BSF had tipped off its Bangladesh counterpart about the militants' presence in that country.

The duo, however, have so far not admitted their involvement in the attack at the Indian Institute of Sciences in 2005, the official said, adding that they will be interrogated again today.

Nazir and Siraj had been living in Bangladesh for approximately a year and they are understood to have revealed vital information regarding their 'terror bases' in south India.

Nazir's name surfaced in February last year, when Mohammed Yahya Kammukutty, 31, hailing from Mukkom in Kozhikode district of Kerala, was arrested as part of a probe into a network of the Students Islamic Movement of India in Karnataka.

According to the official, Nazir admitted during the interrogation that five new recruits of the LeT had gone to Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir to receive training five months after the Bengaluru blasts.

While four of them were killed by the Army, the whereabouts of the last one was not yet known. The duo also revealed the existence of their group's bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain, the official claimed. A team from the Bengaluru police is scheduled to travel to Shillong to take the custody of the two arrested militants, the official said.

The duo were first interrogated at Pynursla police station and later brought to Laban police station in Shillong, where they were being interrogated by a special team of the Meghalaya police and central security agencies, sources said.

According to sources, an intelligence report indicated that a Lashker commander had been in touch with Nazir and the duo was on a recruitment spree under instructions from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.