'Unfortunate father' knew about arms training, Naved reveals to interrogators

Less than a week after the arrest of Mohammed Naved following the terror attack in Udhampur, details have already emerged from his interrogation, and made their way to the media. Even as Islamabad  denies that Naved was of Pakistani-origin , he has reportedly detailed his journey of terror from Faisalabad to Udhampur to investigators.

An Indian Express report on Monday has provided several details of his interrogation. Naved was said to be in his teens when he was contacted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2011. According to an interrogation report, he was motivated by a man named Bashir to join the organisation. He later underwent 21 days of training, and then went back home.

While Naved’s father was reported to have rued that he was an “unfortunate father”, it appears that Naved had informed his parents about the training he received when he got back home. Later, in March 2015, Naved was summoned for the operation in Jammu and Kashmir. Four men were sent across the border, and Naved said that he knew his accomplices by their code names.

After crossing the LoC, they are said to have travelled in a truck to Chursoo as part of their jouney. In fact, the police later arrested the truck driver, Showkat and questioned him, but he denied his involvement. The Indian Express quoted a police officer saying that with Naved’s revelations, his involvement was confirmed.

Furthermore,  The Hindustan Times has quoted a man from Pakistan saying that he is Naved’s father and that the Lashkar-e-Taiba wanted him dead and not captured alive. However, even as Naved’s interrogation and a statement from his family indicate that he crossed the border to carry out the attack, Pakistan has dismissed India’s claims as “baseless”, as reported by Dawn .

Ajmal Kasab, who was captured during the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, also appeared to know very little about his accomplices. In December last year, India Today published excerpts from the transcripts of Kasab’s interrogation. He is said to have told interrogators that the attackers were not allowed to know about each other, even that he was blindfolded when he came to Mumbai on a ship.

While Kasab is said to have received training in a district named Mansehra in the Khyber-Pakhtunwa province, Naved reportedly underwent training in a camp in Shavai Nallah in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

On 3 August, a former of chief of Pakistan’s Federal Investigating Agency had written an op-ed in the newspaper Dawn, in which he said that the 26/11 attacks were indeed planned in Pakistan and had called for ending the distinction between “good Taliban and bad Taliban”. You can read the article here .