From Karachi to Dhaka after the blasts: Congrats

NEW DELHI/KATHMANDU: Just after the Mumbai blasts, a call from Karachi to Dhaka said “mubarakan, mubarakan (congratulations)” in a mission-accomplished tone.

Around the same time, a call from a PCO near Juhu in Mumbai went to an anxious “mother” in Karachi. The caller assured his mother that he was alright (salamat) but could not disclose his location and, saying that he could not talk at length, hung up.

An intensive intelligence operation involving Central agencies and Mumbai police is on, trawling telecom gateways in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata to track calls which contain “footprints” to Tuesday’s blasts. The gateways route calls to Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two places where the terror mastermind could be holed up.

The task of going through the calls is daunting but crucial. It is backbreaking and intensive work. But as communication had to be the key in such a terror operation, there was bound to be some tell-tale evidence — use of codes for bombs — that the perpetrators would have used.

Never a simple task, the job of investigators has been made even more difficult because the post-blast chaos at the train stations may well have destroyed precious forensic evidence and the mobile handsets of some of the terrorists, who may have been able to alight from the trains on time.

As part of the cat and mouse game, terrorists have, said officials, been getting wiser. No PCO is used twice. Masterminds always interface through Thurraya sat phones, the ability to track which is limited to a few organisations. Indeed, most police forces cannot track these sat phones.

Moreoever, the calls are often routed through a third country in a variation of conferencing. But the sleuths are confident of finding the clues by going back 30 days, and if necessary, more. The heightened intelligence had a fallout with some arrests of Pakistani nationals in Kathmandu.