Cops get info on Pak terror camps

Suspects planned attacks in rest of state

By Mateen Hafeez
Mumbai: Thirtyone-year-old Zameer Shaikh, a SIMI member who was picked up by the Mumbai police on Tuesday, is a resident of Lotus Colony at Worli while the 38-year-old Sohail Shaikh, also a SIMI activist, stays at Bhimpura, near Camp in Pune. “We have information that they planned attacks in Aurangabad and Pune and the consignment of explosives was supposed to be brought from Ratnagiri. We are now hunting for about a dozen more suspects who were part of this conspiracy,’’ an officer said. ATS officials said they had alerted officials in Aurangabad, Pune and Ratnagiri.

Zameer, a commerce graduate from Akbar Peerbhoy College near Nagpada, now runs a key-making shop at Grant Road along with his father. He continued working with a few other SIMI members after the organisation was banned in 2001 and they would meet frequently and discuss the “problems the community was facing’’. “Zameer went to Pakistan for training in 2005. His visa and tickets were arranged by a Mumbai-based businessman who doubled up as the LeT commander in Maharashtra. He took an Iran Airlines flight and got down at Teheran airport where he was received by three LeT agents,’’ an official said. The trail then went cold, the official admitted, saying they went to an unknown destination by road.

Sohail was a class-XII dropout from a Pune English-medium school and would “cure’’ patients by “spiritual treatment’’. He obtained training from a terror module in Pakistan in 2003, officials said. No one, however, explained what took police three years to go after him.

Zameer met unani physician Tanvir Ansari three years ago at a library on Belasis Road near Nagpada. It was Tanvir who introduced him to the unidentified LeT ‘commander’, who promised him to help him in jehad by sending him abroad for training.

The Times of India, July 26, 2006