NIA may question IS jihadi for 26/11 links

NEW DELHI: Pakistani national Mohammad Ghani Usman, a veteran bombmaker of Lashkar-e-Taiba, who was arrested in Austria earlier this year and charged by France for November 2015 Paris attacks, may soon face Indian investigators as a National Investigation Agency team is planning to fly to France.

Top officials said NIA wants to interrogate 35-year-old Usman, who later joined Islamic State to find out if the "expert bomb-maker" of the LeT played any part in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. In his disclosures to agencies, Tamil Nadu-based Indian fighter of ISIS, Subahani Haja Moideen, has said that Usman was his best pal in Iraq and often told him that he was an "important person" in the LeT heirarchy while in Pakistan.

The agency will write to ministries of home and external affairs seeking permission to travel to France soon. It is already in touch with France on Moideen's fresh claims about Paris attacks and his training period with Paris attackers conspirators including their group commander, a man they knew as Abu Suleiman Al-Francisi, who they suspect could be the mastermind of Paris carnage, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

NIA, sources say , wants to extract from Usman information about his links with senior leadership of LeT including Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-Ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who perpetrated the November 2008 Mumbai serial attacks carried out by 10 fidayeens including Ajmal Kasab, who was caught alive by police and later given death sentence.

Apart from 26/11, NIA wants to understand LeT's link with ISIS and why a seasoned bomb-maker of the Pakistan outfit joined the latter. Usman, as first reported by TOI, used to talk for hours with Moideen about India and Pakistan during their training period and stay in Afghanistan and Iraq between April and September 2015. While Usman left for Europe posing as a migrant along with other jihadis including the Paris bombers, Moideen returned to India around the same time in September last year.

Both were part of a 150 member group named, Umar Ibnu Khatab Khatiba, of trained foreign terrorist fighters (FTF) from Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, south-east Asian countries including Indonesia, Philippines, Tunisia and European countries.

Meanwhile, Moideen's questioning has also revealed for the first time that the "online handlers motivators" of Islamic State, who never met the recruits and are supposed to be based in a third country, actually met them on the ground. Moideen's online contact since his indoctrination in 2014 and early 2015, identified as one Abu Hafa Al Swedi, having an online alibi as `Abu Computer', met him several times in Iraq, said sources.