Earned notoriety and came on the police radar after the Mumbai serial bombings
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New Delhi: Abdul Karim Tunda, Delhi Police’s big catch Friday, began his career as a carpenter, moved on to do scrap-dealing before becoming a cloth merchant. And then he took to terror.
Police say he got radicalised in the eighties when he “came in touch” with the Lashker-e-Taiba through operatives of the ISI, Pakistan’s secret agency.
But he earned notoriety and came on the police radar after the Mumbai serial bombings in 1993 that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992.
Police say that before he got involved in the Mumbai bombings, he had constituted a “tanzeem” - an organisation set up with the lofty aim of working for the community - Tanzeem Islah-ul-Muslimeen (Islamic Armed Organisation) with one Jalees Ansari, a resident of Mumbai.
Another top Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant, Azam Ghouri, joined up with another Tanzeem floated by Ahl-e-Hadis to avenge the Babri Masjid demolition in the Indian town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.
He got the moniker Tunda - Hindi for without a hand - after his left hand got severed in an accident while preparing a bomb in 1985 in Mumbai.
Born in a poor family in 1943 at Chatta Lal Miya area in central Delhi’s Daryaganj, Tunda started his career as a carpenter at his native village in Bazaar Khurd area in Pilkhuwa in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district.
He started supporting his father who used to melt metal like copper, zinc and aluminium to earn livelihood.
After his father’s death, he was the lone earner of his family so he started working in scrap dealing to earn more money, but it was not enough to met his expenses. Later he became a cloth merchant before becoming a radicalised jihadi militant.
He married three times, including an 18-year-old girl, at the age of 65.
His younger brother Abdul Malek, who still is a carpenter, is reportedly the only immediate family member alive in India.
He also stayed in Pakistan where he is known to have imparted training on fabrication of IED and other explosives to mujahids, who are sent to India from Pakistan for jihad.
He returned from Dhaka to India to mastermind the deadly 1996 and 1998 bombings. In almost all the bombings in Delhi during 1996 and 1998, Tunda’s men, who were from Pakistan and Bangladesh, had detonated the bomb bombs using pencil batteries, police said.
The most devastating of these blasts was in a crowded private bus at Punjabi Bagh in Delhi in December 1997 which occurred when the bus, running between Ajmeri Gate and Nangloi, reached Rampura in Punjabi Bagh, killing four commuters and injuring 24.
Subsequently, Tunda fled to Pakistan via Bangladesh, from his home in Ghaziabad in 1998.
Tunda tried to cause serial explosions in India in 2010, just before the Commonwealth Games using an elaborate network of human traffickers and fake currency suppliers active in Bangladesh. Tunda had also been associated with Rohingya operatives in the past. His association with LeT commanders Rehan alias Zafar and Azam Cheema alias Babajee is well known.
An aide of fugitive don Dawood Ebrahim and an operative of Lashkar-e-Taiba who was also wanted for suspected involvement in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, he was arrested Friday around 3pm in Uttarakhand’s Banbasa area close to the Nepal border when he was trying to enter India.
Tunda, 70, was presented in a Delhi court which sent him to three days’ police custody for interrogation.
He got the moniker Tunda - Hindi for without a hand - after his left hand got severed in an accident while he was preparing a bomb in 1985 in Mumbai.
“He was carrying a Pakistani passport number AC 4413161 issued Jan 23 in the name of Abdul Quddus,” Special Commissioner of Police S.N. Srivastava told media persons.
Tunda is wanted in several criminal cases in the country and is among India’s 20 top most-wanted terrorists, police said.
In Delhi, he is wanted in 21 terror cases dating back to 1994.
Tunda had also tried to set off bombs in 2010 just before the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, according to police.
“Tunda is closely associated with LeT and ISI in Pakistan,” Srivastava said.
Police received a tip-off from intelligence agencies about two weeks back that Tunda will try to sneak into India from Nepal.
Tunda, an LeT explosive expert, is allegedly involved in the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings that left over 250 dead, Delhi bomb blasts of 1997-98 and serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh and also in Haryana and Punjab.
Police said he trained young radicals in preparing bombs with locally available materials like urea, nitric acid, potassium chloride, nitrobenzene and sugar and planting them at crowded places.
Tunda, who was born in 1943 in Delhi’s Daryaganj area, is also wanted in several cases of bomb attacks in trains in Hyderabad, Gulbarga, Surat and Lucknow.
He allegedly worked with terror operatives like Hafiz Saeed, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, Wadhawa Singh, Ratandeep Singh, and Karachi-based Indian Mujahideen absconders Abdul Aziz alias Bada Sajid.
Soon after his birth, Tunda along with his family had shifted to their native village in Bazaar Khurd area in Pilkhuwa in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district.
Five years ago, Tunda, then 65, got married for the third time to an 18-year-old girl in Pakistan.
Tunda worked as a carpenter, scrap dealer and cloth merchant till the age of 40, before becoming a radicalised jihadi militant, police said.
Following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 in Uttar Pradesh, Tunda floated a radical organisation in Mumbai, police said.
In January 1994, Tunda fled to Bangladesh capital Dhaka where he started training jihadis in bomb-making, police said.
Investigators said Tunda also trained terror operatives in making improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Tunda’s two Bangladeshi students, Mato-ur Rehman and Akbar alias Haroon, were arrested from Sadar Bazar railway station in Delhi in February 1998. Police later arrested 24 other members of the “module”.
For some years Tunda lay low and investigators thought he had died in a blast in Bangladesh in 2000.
Five years later, Abdul Razzaq Masoud, an alleged LeT chief coordinator in Dubai, arrested by the Special Cell of Delhi Police, however, told investigators that Tunda was alive and he met him in Lahore in December 2003.
In 2008, Tunda alias Abdul Quddus figured in the list of terrorists which India handed over to Pakistan after the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. This list includes people like Hafiz Saeed, Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masoud Azhar, and Dawood Ebrahim.
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