BANGALORE/ISLAMABAD, 30 September — Indian police said yesterday they had shot dead five suspected Muslim militants in the southern city of Bangalore who were plotting to assassinate Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and other Hindu leaders. Imam Ali, 32, one of the accused in the 1993 bombing of a regional office of the extremist Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, was among those killed in a raid on a house, police said.
In Bangalore, city police chief H.T. Sangliana told a press conference that the raid was carried out between 2:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. Sunday (2030 GMT and 2200 GMT Saturday) jointly by about 40 police commandos from southern Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.
Thirteen policemen sustained minor injuries during the raid and five militants, one of them a 23-year-old woman, were killed in the ensuing gunbattle. “It was culmination of information collected by the Tamil Nadu police. One prime accused Imam Ali has been organizing a gang indulging in various anti-social activities, murder, robbery and manufacture of explosives,” Sangliana said.
Ashutosh Shukla, deputy inspector general of police of Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu, who took part in the raid, said Ali had been planning to assassinate top Hindu leaders. “We have information that Ali was planning to go to Allahabad (in northern Uttar Pradesh state) and was plotting to kill the deputy prime minister, the human resources minister (Murali Manohar Joshi) and Ashok Singal (chief of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad),” Shukla said.
Meanwhile, Pakistan yesterday blasted Advani for blaming the ISI for acts of terrorism in India, saying the world does not take his “extremist” comments seriously. “The world is quite clear that Advani is an extremist Hindu leader that’s why it does not take seriously what he says about Pakistan,” President Pervez Musharraf’s spokesman Lt. Gen. Rashid Qureshi told reporters in Islamabad.
“He straightaway blames Pakistan without even waiting for an inquiry or investigation into any incident.” Advani’s “attempt to malign the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency is to divert international and domestic attention toward the failure of his own security forces in controlling law and order inside India,” Qureshi said.
