Surveyors arouse suspicions near BARC

Two men entered the area around Bhaba Atomic Research Centre and fed inputs on road topography into their wireless communication service GPRS arousing suspicions of people against the backdrop of US terror suspect David Headley having reportedly conducted a recce there.

People in Anu Shakti Nagar, an area where families of BARC reside, got suspicious about the activity of the two men on the fringes of the country's high security atomic research facility in Trombay near here recently and handed them over to police.

Later, the duo turned out be two employees who were conducting a survey on behalf of Survey of India's office but without a proper sanction, official sources said on Tuesday.

Police registered a case against the two for alleged trespassing and misrepresenting the facts and later released on bail after they produced a letter from Survey of India's Dehradun office showing that they had been assigned to conduct a survey of the area, the sources said. The two persons hailing from a private firm in Bangalore were hired by the Survey of India for conducting survey work but the letter given had no clear instructions for them to conduct a survey inside the Anu Shakti Nagar.

Areas around sensitive installations are marked and are usually not shown on any maps but in this case directions and names of roads were being fed into General Packet Radio Service which in turn could have been connected with a private server.

The people in the area were already in a state of caution after it was reported that Headley had conducted a detailed survey of the area and that BARC could be one of the terror targets.  While tracing Headley's movements in Mumbai, investigators had found that he had conducted a proper reconnaissance of not only BARC but also of some Bollywood studios in the north-eastern suburb of the city.

49-year-old Headley, who has been under arrest in the US since October last year, had travelled to Chembur and Trombay several times and filmed the exit and entry points of BARC besides the movement of employees, investigators said. The terror suspect, who has been charged by the FBI with being part of the conspiracy in 26/11 Mumbai attacks, had also taken video shots of the nuclear facility by hiring a boat from Gateway of India.

The rear side of the BARC, located on a hill top, can be seen from the Arabian Sea. The investigators also comprising officials of National Investigation Agency, probing the role of Headley and his Pakistani-Canadian accomplice Tahawwur Rana in India, suspect that during his boat ride, the Pakistani-American may have surveyed the mangroves located near the coastline. The security around the nuclear installation has been tightened and efforts were on to ensure proper cover in the mangroves, the sources said.

Security of National Thermal Power Corporation's cold storage plant in the area was also being reviewed as the security agencies were apprehensive that while filming BARC, Headley may have conducted recce of it as well. The terror suspect is known to have been trained by Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Tayiba in the clandestine filming of vital installations.