Terrorist SIM card trail leads to Kolkata

KOLKATA/NEW DELHI: In a major breakthrough that shows that the Pakistan-based terrorists exploited the weaknesses in the issuance of SIM cards,Kolkata police have arrested two people, one from Kolkata and the other from Delhi, for their alleged role in the Mumbai terror attack. ( Watch ) The duo, Kolkata-resident Tousif Rehman (26) and J&K police constable, Mukhtar Ahmed Sheikh (34), arrested from Delhi, had allegedly bought 22 SIM cards that terrorists involved in the Mumbai carnage used. They had brought the SIMs from different shops in Kolkata after faking documents of a dead man. However, the two, arrested on Friday, have been booked for fraud and criminal conspiracy. Terrorists used 22 SIMs, purchased from West Bengal, during the attack and police are looking for the people who bought the remaining ones -- three from Kolkata and another 10 from Barasat, police say. Rehman acted as local contact in the ring, and procured 19 SIMs in October after submitting his uncle Ashraf Naumani's voter identity card. Ashraf had died in 2005. The SIMs belong to various service providers —Vodafone, Airtel and Aircel. Senior intelligence sources were reluctant to call the arrests a major breakthrough. The initial assessment was that Tausif and Sheikh were engaged, using fake papers, in procuring SIM cards which were later sold at a huge premium to shawl sellers from Kashmir and others. In this connection, the fraudulently obtained SIM cards landed with Lashkar that has a big network in network in J&K, and which had long planned to target Mumbai. But they were not ruling out anything yet. "We have to examine it thoroughly," said a senior source familiar with the details of the case. The arrests highlight the continued vulnerabilities in the system which have repeatedly been exploited by the terrorists and their collaborators to obtain cell phone connections. Moreover, given the Kashmir connection, investigators would also like to ascertain whether the other terrorists and their collaborators were also among the 'customers' of Tausif and Sheikh. Mukhtar apparently was cocky that he would give the cops a slip and booked himself into the heavily-guarded J&K government's guest house in New Delhi's Chanakapuri diplomatic enclave. He was in Delhi along with his colleague SI Latif Ahmed for an official assignment. Earlier, sub-inspectors Partha Mukherjee and Pulak Dutta from Kolkata police had travelled to Srinagar to follow up on Mukhtar's lead. Tousif wasn't home when the police came to arrest him earlier this week. Cops, however, swooped down on Howrah station and arrested him on Friday evening. Tousif told interrogators that Mukhtar had engaged him to collect the SIMs and also spilled the beans about his whereabouts. A police officer said Mukhtar came to Kolkata from Srinagar seven years ago in 2001 as a shawl seller and married a local girl the next year. Thereafter he stayed with his in-laws in Kolkata for a few years. Some years later, Mukhtar returned to Srinagar but frequented Kolkata regularly. During his last Kolkata visit in October, Mukhtar asked Tousif to arrange some SIMs for him and offered four to five times the market price. Tousif did the job for him for the cut. A Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) team is coming to Kolkata and is likely to the take the two in transit remand for further investigations into the fake SIM racket operating in the country that might help them to track various terror modules in operation. Following various leads, Kolkata police tracked the shop at Park Circus that had issued the SIMs against the ID card of dead man Ashraf Numani. After raiding his home, police discovered that Numani is no more and that his nephew Tousif had actually bought the SIMs. Tousif's statement to the police points to a large fake SIM racket that has been operating for the last couple of years. What the police have unearthed could be a tip of an iceberg. "We've booked them for cheating and forgery as they produced fake documents to get the SIMs. We've also slapped conspiracy charges against them for they had an ulterior motive. The arrests will throw light on the Mumbai terror module," Kolkata police's Jawed Shamim said.