Lashkar funded Mumbai attacks with fake currency

Some of the money used to finance the terror attacks in Mumbai last November and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru in December 2005 came via a fake currency racket, sources from the Intelligence Bureau and Central Bureau of Investigation have revealed.

Operatives in Dubai and Pakistan, backed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, used fake currency to fund terror operations on Indian soil.

Sources in the investigation agencies said the Lashkar-e-Tayiba spent Rs 3.5 crore (Rs 35 million) on the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, of which Rs 80 lakh (Rs 8 million) came from the fake currency racket.

Source : Rediff

Some years ago, when General Pervez Musharraf, the blue-eyed warrior against terrorism of the then United States President George W Bush, was the President of Pakistan, its police had arrested an individual on the charge of belonging to the Al Qaeda.

When he was produced before an anti-terrorism court, it asked the government lawyer to produce a copy of the notification under which Al Qaeda had been declared a terrorist organisation. After some days, the lawyer went back to the court and told it sheepishly that the government had overlooked declaring Al Qaeda a terrorist organisation.

Source : Rediff

Bruce Riedel, senior National Security Council official in the Clinton Administration, who spearheaded President Obama's strategic review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told rediff.com that for all the Pakistani leadership assurances that the ISI has severed its links with terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Taliban, the ISI's association with them is as entrenched as ever.

In an interaction that followed his remarks and that of other experts at a discussion on Afghanistan and Pakistan: A Status Report, organized by The Brookings Institution, Riedel said change is "not going to come overnight," and pointed to the recent release of  LeT leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed as a tangible manifestation of these entrenched links.

Riedel, currently a Senior Fellow at Brookings, said, "This relationship is built over 30 years," with these groups "and is not going to be resolved overnight." 

"First of all, many Pakistanis don't believe we'll be there," in the region over the long-term. "They believe we're going to cut and run, whether it is three years from now or four years from now." Thus, Riedel said, these so-called strategic assets for Islamabad's efforts to maintain a strategic depth against India in Afghanistan and to fight its proxy war in Kashmir would continue to be a kind of insurance policy in the event of a US withdrawal and a diminution of massive assistance as has been the experience of the past. "Changing that calculation will be critical," he said, if the US is to succeed in persuading Pakistan to "change their policies," towards these groups. But Riedel acknowledged that "the hard part right now," was to convince Pakistan to sever its links with these groups because the ISI evidently believe that these associations will pay off in the long run.