The Pak-based Lashkar-e-Toiba handlers of the 26/11 attackers made a series of random phone calls to numbers across India — in the days before the terror strike — to keep their Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) account active after an email from their US service provider saying that the account, purchased in October, wasn’t generating any traffic.

It was this VoIP account, bought using the e-mail id kharak_telco@yahoo.com, that the handlers used to call the 10 attackers on their mobile phones. This is borne out by email exchanges between the handlers and Callphonex, the New Jersey-based service provider, and an investigation by the Mumbai police that checked and cleared each number dialled.

“The Lashkar handler, using the alias Kharak Singh, is thought to have got jittery about his VoIP account becoming inactive and so made random calls to increase traffic and ensure the account was not deactivated,” said Deven Bharti, Additional Commissioner at Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch, and one of the key investigators who co-ordinated with the FBI which detected these calls.

“These calls were completely random, our teams tracked and verified each local number dialled. Absolutely no evidence has been found to suggest that the recipients of these calls acted as local contacts for the terrorists,” Bharti said. That the calls were random is evident from some of the numbers they dialled. For instance, they called 66665353, 66665363 in Mumbai, which do not exist.

According to call data records, the Lashkar man handling the VoIP account is believed to have tried to test the service and made five calls on November 23. One of them was to a number in Pune which lasted 17 seconds, with the receiver unable to comprehend what the caller was saying. The four other calls were made to out-of-service landline numbers in Mumbai.

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