In keeping with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent remarks that tracking terror funding should be a priority for police and intelligence agencies, the Government has begun charging arrested terrorists and anti-national elements under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Indeed, in the past two months, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has registered almost a dozen cases under the PMLA — the first under the statute which came into force in July 2005 — which has provisions for arrest and criminal action against persons laundering proceeds for crime.

Among those charged under PMLA are arrested Al-Badr operatives who had allegedly planned to attack the Bangalore Vikas Soudha building and among those shortly to face the ED’s action are a group of eight Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives who were caught with explosives like tiffin carrier bombs in Bangalore and are said to have laundered substantial sums via the hawala route from Saudi Arabia.

The PMLA case filed against the Pakistani Al-Badr operatives Mohammed Koya and Mohammad Ali Hussain is revealing for it shows that they had taken a cue from the 9/11 terror attack in New York and had attempted to infiltrate into private pilot training institutes to get licenses and then join private Indian airliners and commit acts of terror. The duo were arrested with weapons in Mysore on October 27 and have subsequently been re-arrested by the ED.

The ED, after completing its investigations into the oil-for-food scandal, in fact, is on an overdrive registering cases under the PMLA statute which has a minimum violation limit of Rs 30 lakh for any laundering of proceeds of crime. But for cases against “anti-national elements,” including terrorists and drug offenders, PMLA can be invoked for even smaller amounts.

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