Hyderabad: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Central Crime Station (CCS) brought the terrorist Abdul Karim Tunda, an alleged bomb maker of terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, to the city on Saturday.
He was brought to the Nampally court for adjournment hearing on a conspiracy case in which a bomb exploded at the Ganesh temple in Secunderabad in Telangana.
After the court posted the matter to October 15, Karim was sent to the Chanchalguda prison.
Tunda and his associates conspired to carry out blasts during the Ganesh festival in Hyderabad. However, the police prevented the mishap.
The 76-year-old Karim was responsible for 40 bomb blasts that took place in the country.
After the blasts, he fled from the country. However, seven years ago the police arrested him on the India-Nepal border. Since then, he had been lodged in prison.
Who is Syed Abdul Karim alias Tunda?
- The 70-year-old Tunda was an explosives expert for the LeT, an expert in making inprovised (IED) explosive devices widely used by the militant outfit while carrying out a spate of bomb explosions in the late 1990s in Uttar Pradesh.
- A resident of Pilkhua in Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad district, Tunda was one of the 20 terrorists whose extradition India had demanded from Pakistan after the 2001 attack on Parliament House.
- He got his name 'Tunda' after losing an arm while making a bomb.
- He received his training in making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Pakistan. He then came in contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives and soon became the top bomb maker for the terror organisation. He is also said to be close to Dawood Ibrahim.
- The CBI had charged Tunda with organising LeT's major terror attacks outside of Jammu and Kashmir -- a series of 43 bombings in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Rohtak and Jalandhar in which at least 20 persons were killed and over 400 injured.
- He had also triggered explosions on inter-city trains on December 6, 1993 that claimed two lives.
- He was allegedly involved in executing a blast outside the Delhi Police HQ and Lajpat Nagar.
- In all, 33 criminal cases are registered against Tunda.
- He is also reportedly connected with Indian Mujahideen (known earlier as Students Islamic Movement of India), Jaish-e-Mohammad and Jamat-ud-Dawa other than LeT.
- The hunt for Tunda was almost given up following reports of his death in Bangladesh in 2000. However these reports were proven false after Abdul Razzak Masood, an alleged LeT operative who had been arrested by the Special Cell of the Delhi Police revealed that he had met Tunda recently.
- In 2006, it was thought that he had been apprehended in Nairobi, but that too turned out to be a false alarm.
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