How Yasin Bhatkal managed to slip away every time

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: Yasin Bhatkal must be the only terrorist to have played such a long hide-and-seek game with Indian agencies despite being in the country all along.

Unlike most top terrorists, who invariably melted into Pakistan or West Asia after terror strikes or after their names cropped up on agency radars, Bhatkal chose to stay back and conducted blast after blast for five years despite every agency trailing him.

For someone who claimed to be an engineer, he shook off agencies by staying off phones and used modern means of communication sparingly. Sources in the security establishment doggedly tracking Bhatkal for years, say he seldom made calls. When he did, he used public booths. On rare occasions when he used cellphones, the numbers were obtained on fake identities. Worse, the phones weren't used for too long.

Most of his important communications were through chat services like Nimbuzz and Yahoo. "These he used sparingly—only when an operation had to be put in motion and instructions given. He believed in meeting people personally and discussing plans. He moved with a core group that acted together and personally planted bombs," an officer tracking him said.
Security agencies tracked several of his calls, mostly after he stopped using the number. Many of his chats were flagged, but by the time agencies cut through the red tape to seek information from foreign servers, Bhatkal had not only moved to a new thread online but also to a new location physically.

"This explains why we came close to nabbing him several times but failed. Whenever he used mobiles, conversations were brief and snappy. By the time we tracked the chatter, he had moved on," the officer said.

It explains how Yasin remained holed up in a Darbhanga village for more than a year before conducting the 2011 Mumbai blasts. He planned the conspiracy at the village, testing bombs in a mango orchard and test-firing guns, but no one ever got to know.

Once he was nabbed in Kolkata but walked free pretending to be the son of a businessman. In November 2011, IB learnt he was at the house of suspected IM operative, Abdur Rehmand at Selaiyur, Chennai. The IB team reached half an hour too late. Check points at railway and bus stations were in vain. In October 2008, he escaped when Karnataka Police delayed a raid on a hideout near Kopa in Chikamagalur after raids on IM operatives in Mangalore.
In December 2011, he gave the slip to Delhi police special cell and Maharashtra ATS when they laid a trap outside Mumbai's Habib Apartment thinking he would return. He saw more than 100 plain clothes cops outside the building and never returned.