Abdul Karim Tunda: From a carpenter to top Lashkar terrorist

70-year-old Tunda was an expert bomb maker of terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Born in 1943 at Chatta Lal Miya,behind Delite Cinema,Daryaganj,Tunda worked as a carpenter,scarp dealer and cloth merchant till he attained the age of 40 years before becoming a radicalised jehadi militant. Soon after his birth,his father along with his family had shifted to their native village in Bazaar Khurd,Railway Road,Pilkhua in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad.

Arrested LeT terrorist Tunda had planned attack in Delhi before CWG

Before joining the ranks of the terror outfit,he also ran a homoeopathic shop in Loharan Mohalla in the early 1980’s.

Since then the turn of events through which he came into contact with the terror module are sketchy.

It is known that in the early ’80s Tunda was initiated into terrorism by the ISI and he crossed over to Pakistan where he underwent training in making improvised explosive devices. He was known as Tunda (handicapped) after he lost his left hand in a bomb-making accident.

Tunda curse returns to Pilakhuwa whenever there is a blast

According to police,besides being an expert in bomb making,Tunda had a major hand in spreading Laskhar-e-Taiba’s network outside Jammu and Kashmir.

Police said Tunda was wanted in 21 cases in Delhi alone that were committed in 1994 and in 1996-1998.Tunda was one of 20 terrorists India had demanded the Pakistani government to hand over after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack.

The sources claim that though he was not directly involved in perpetrating bombings after 1998,he acted as mentor for a younger generation of Lashkar operatives,financing and organising operations across India.

The CBI had charged Karim 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 over 20 persons were killed and over 400 injured.

In 1993,Tunda and Ansari had set off a series of explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate bomb blasts on trains. After Jalees’s arrest in January 1994,Tunda fled to Dhaka,capital of Bangladesh,police said.

He returned from Dhaka to India to mastermind the deadly 1996-1998 blasts. In almost all the blasts in Delhi during 1996-98,Tunda’s men,who were from Pakistan and Bangladesh,had detonated bombs using pencil batteries,police said.

According to the police,Tunda was also the mastermind of the series of bomb blasts in New Delhi,Panipat,Sonepat,Ludhiana,Kanpur and Varanasi between December 1996 and January 1998.

The breakthrough for the police came with the arrest (February,1998) of Tunda’s two Bangladeshi ‘students’,Mato-ur Rehman and Akbar alias Haroon,from Sadar Bazar

railway station,New Delhi,police said.

According to police,Tunda has been declared a ‘proclaimed offender’ in the cases pending against him for the 1996-98 serial blasts. He had also been associated with Rohingyan operatives in the past.

His association with Rehan alias Zafar (LeT Commander),Azam Cheema alias Babajee (LeT Commander) is well known,police said.

(With PTI inputs)