On November 23, 2007, barely two hours after a series of blasts in courts across Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow killed 15 people, the state police received a call from an unknown outfit called the Indian Mujahideen, which claimed responsibility for the blast.
Till then, intelligence agencies had suspected the Students Islamic Movement of India of having orchestrated the serial blasts. The call from the IM managed to divert focus from the SIMI and shot the hitherto unknown outfit into the national spotlight.
On Tuesday, a man calling himself Abu Jindal called up the correspondent of an Indian daily in Pakistan. He claimed that a new outfit called the Lashkar-e-Taiyba al-Almi ha carried out the Pune blast on February 13, which killed 10 people and injured many more. The call from the unknown group will shift the intelligence agencies' attention off the Indian Mujahideen, which was suspected to have carried out the blast.
The agencies had zeroed in on the IM based on the revelations of Shahzad, one of its key operatives, who told interrogators that the IM had been regrouping and was planning to strike again under a pseudonym.
Intelligence Bureau officials pointed out that this pattern was followed by terror outfits to confuse the investigators and divert the attention of the agencies. A similar call was made purportedly by the IM after the UP serial blasts and by the Deccan Mujahideen after the terror attack on Mumbai.
The caller claimed that his group was a breakaway faction of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which had parted ways with the LeT and the Inter Services Intelligence and was planning to carry out Jihadi activities on its own. However, this claim falls flat, as the ISI has actively backed terror outfits in India so far
Incidentally, Abu Jindal is not a new name for the intelligence agencies. Abu Jindal or Jundal is the name of the accent trainer of the Lashkar, originally from Hyderabad, who trained the ten terrorists for the Mumbai siege.
IB sources point out that the call came in the wake of an email sent by Al Qaeda terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri to Asia Times Online in Pakistan, in which the commander of the 313 brigade speaks about targeting Indian cities. These developments over the past couple of days have intensified the pressure on the ISI and the latest call by Lashkar-e-Taiyba al-Almi seemed like a desperate ploy to confuse the investigators.
There are absolutely no records to show the existence of such an outfit and it is clear that it was a hoax call, said IB officials.
