Suspected terrorist held in Bangalore

Bangalore: A man suspected of being involved in terrorist activities has been apprehended by the Bangalore Police.

Bilal alias Imran, a Kashmiri, was nabbed near Jalahalli on Friday morning. Arms including an AK47 were recovered from him.

"The arrest was made on the basis of a tip-off and the police is interrogating the suspect," Additional Commissioner of Police Bipin Gopalkrishna told PTI.

Police sources said the suspected terrorist, who is in his early 30s, had come by bus from Hospet in Bellary district before he was nabbed.

The police have yet to ascertain what terrorist outfit he belongs to.

In recent times, there have been debates as to whether terrorist outfits are shifting their base down south. Bangalore has been one of the cities that has been subjected to terror attacks.

On December 28, 2005, an armed intruder opened fire at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) premises in Bangalore, killing a professor - Professor M C Puri - of IIT-Delhi and injuring five others.

The intruder entered the building premises in an Ambassador car and started firing indiscriminately near the Tata Auditorium where a seminar, International Conference on Management Studies was being held. Professor Puri was among the 250 professors attending the seminar.

The terrorists managed to escape after the attack, which was pre-planned according to the police.

Just a day after the IISc attack, newspaper offices in Bangalore received a fax claiming there were six jehadis in the city, two of whom were human bombs.

The letter had threatened that the target of the human bombs was then chief minister, Dharam Singh.

For many years now, security agencies have been warning about the existence of sleeper cells of jehadi outfits in south India.

This is a network of people who are sympathetic to the jehadis and it is activated by pro al-Qaeda organisations from time to time.

Pakistan's terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Toiba is known to be the most active in the region, followed by Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami.

The Lashkar is suspected to operate through several front organisations like the Muslim Defence Force.

The Delhi Police has been crying itself hoarse over the threat for well over a year now, when it busted a Lashkar sleeper cell in the Capital. These arrested terrorists revealed that IT majors in Bangalore were on their hit list.