Rs 1 lakh gift to wife gave away Yasin Bhatkal's Nepal hideout

NEW DELHI: Yasin Bhatkal may have been a radicalised jihadi with a high level of motivation but he had an Achilles’ heel that eventually led to his capture.

Letters that the Indian Mujahideen topgun sent to his wife in Delhi and phone calls he made to her from Nepal apparently gave Intelligence Bureau clues, about six months ago, about his presence in Nepal.

A top home ministry official told ET on condition of anonymity that Bhatkal’s correspondence with his fellow cadres and specifically his wife, Zahida, whom he married in 2008, was his “mistake” that gave the vital lead to IB which sent in its sleuths to track him down to Pokhara in Nepal, almost 250 km from the Indo-Nepal border.

Bhatkal sent Rs 1 lakh earlier this month to his wife through normal banking channels as an Eid gift. This combined with his earlier letters and phone calls to her from Nepal detected over the last six months contributed to his capture.

There are reports that Bhatkal also sent foreign currency through hawala channels to his wife but the official did not confirm this. Zahida’s father, Mohammad Irshad, who hails from Samastipur in Bihar, was arrested earlier by Delhi Police for conspiring with Bhatkal in terror activities when the latter set up an arms factory in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area.

Zahida has refused to speak to journalists since Bhatkal’s arrest. “We learnt six months ago through surveillance on his family members that he was somewhere in Nepal and got the mobile number he was using to speak to his family and fellow cadres across India.

It took dedicated tracking of his phone to zero him down to a house in Pokhara a month back. IB sleuths kept a close watch on him by taking up a house nearby – Bhatkal mostly remained confined inside his house and always stepped out in disguise,” the senior official said.

On Wednesday morning, IB moved in to nab him and his key associate Asadullah Akhtar from their hideout after being reasonably sure that they were the wanted men. Nepal Police was kept in the loop, the official said. Heavy rain in Pokhara meant it took the entire day for the IB team to bring him to the Indo-Nepal border. He was formally shown as arrested in Raxaul in Bihar at 8 am on Thursday.