NATION | Saturday, July 25, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Madani’s terror links surface again
VR Jayaraj | Kozhikode
Arrested LeT operative Muhammad Abdul Halim of Kannur, mastermind behind the Bangalore blasts, admitted to the Kerala Police interrogators that he had close links with Islamist leader Abdul Nasser Madani, chairman of the PDP with which the ruling CPI(M) had made a pact for the recent Lok Sabha polls.
Halim, a former PDP activist, told the police that he was a personal bodyguard of Madani between 1995 and 1998, but the PDP chairman denied any such connections. The police, meanwhile, submitted an application before Judicial First Class Magistrate S Rasmi for getting Halim in custody for questioning.
The police said they had to question him further and had to take him to various places for evidence-gathering. The court would consider the plea on Saturday.
Security experts said Halim’s statements to the police would tighten the trap on Madani despite his denials and the support he was allegedly enjoying from the strong section in the ruling CPI(M). Madani had said he had never known Abdul Sattar alias Sainuddeen aka Sattar Bahi, who was presently in the custody of the Karnataka Police for manufacturing the explosives used in the Bangalore terror acts.
But Halim had given the police enough clues to establish the Madani-Sainuddeen links, experts said. However, Madani’s denial this time was qualified: He would
welcome a ban on his party if it was proved that anyone associated with the PDP in the past five years had any terror links, he said in Kochi on Friday.
Halim, who was arrested the other day for his role in the twin blasts at Kozhikode in March, 2006, told the police that he had gone to meet Madani at the Ayurvedic hospital Arya Vaidya Sala, Kottakkal, Malappuram, with Nazeer of Kannur, the chief operative of the LeT in South India who was now believed to be hiding in Saudi Arabia, when the PDP leader was undergoing treatment. This meeting should have been in or before 1998, when Madani was arrested and handed over to the Tamil Nadu police in connection with the Coimbatore blasts.
The arrested terror blast-man said Madani had told him that Sainuddeen would teach him something, but the police refused to divulge the details of these “lessons.” He had met Sainuddeen as per this instruction. According to the police, it was Sainuddeen who had trained Halim in the art of bomb-making. The statement of Halim was supposed to become a severe setback to Madani’s denial of any familiarity with Sainuddeen.
The Kochi police had earlier learned from the accused in the case of burning of a Tamil Nadu State bus at Kalamassery near Kochi (Halim was an accused in this case also) and some witnesses that Sainuddeen’s little daughter had been attending school staying at the residence of Sufiya, wife of Madani. The PDP chairman had also denied this.
According to the police, Nazeer, Sainuddeen and Halim had planned to recruit 150 young men from Kerala for training in Pakistan. It was the first batch of this recruits who had met with an attack from security forces in which four Malayalee militants had been killed in October last. The police had already confirmed that Halim had close connections with those killed in Kashmir.
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