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| Gujarat temple attack conspirators name Pakistan
AHMEDABAD, India, Aug 29 (AFP) - Five persons held for last year's militant attack on a Hindu temple in west India's Gujarat state confessed Friday the attack was planned by two Pakistan-based militant outfits, police said. Last September, two armed gunmen entered the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar, capital of Gujarat, and opened fire. BizVantage – Beyond the news - a realtime Net clipping service: for business, investment or technology. Twenty-eight Hindu devotees died in the massacre, while three paramilitary commandos were killed before the two gunmen were eventually shot dead. On Thursday night, five men were picked up in Gujarat in connection with the attacks. They have been identified as Salim Hanif Shaikh, Altaf Akbar Hussain Malek, Adam Suleman Ajmeri, Mufti Abdulqayyum Mansuri and Maulvi Abdullamiya Sayyed. At a news conference, city police chief K.R. Kaushik said the idea for the attack was hatched in Riyadh, capital of Saudi Arabia. He said those behind the plan and its execution included members of the two banned militant groups -- Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashker-e-Toiba (LeT) -- and members of the Pakistani secret service, the Inter State Intelligence (ISI). The two militant groups have been blamed on scores of militant attacks in disputed Kashmir state and elsewhere in India. "Five men arrested on Thursday have confessed that the Akshardham militant attack was plotted by the Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Toiba and the ISI in Riyadh and Hyderabad (southern Indian city)," Kaushik said. He added that confessions from the five reveal that Abu Tallah and Abu Sufiyan, who allegedly "manage" the two militant networks in India, played a crucial role in planning the temple attack. He said Adam Ajmeri also came to Gujarat from Pakistan to survey which places could be targeted. The attacks followed months of Hindu-Muslim rioting in Gujarat in which nearly 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. "Ajmeri picked up the two militants from the Ahmedabad railway station a week before the incident took place. It is not known where they had come from. He put up the militants at his brother's house in the Dariapur area of Ahmedabad city," Kaushik said. "They went around in a rickshaw to a Jain temple, a few Hindu temples and BJP (ruling Hindu nationalist party) and VHP (a right-wing HIndu outfit) offices in the city," the officer said. "In Gandhinagar, they looked at the Gujarat assembly and finally the Akshardham temple to decide as to which place should be attacked. Finally, they decided on Akhshardham." The police said that in the confessions, the alleged conspirators of the Akshardham killings claim that on the day of the attack, the two militants said their prayers in the presence of Muslim cleric Maulvi Abdullah and Mufti Abdulqayyum. Then the two militants, who have been identified Hafiz Yassir from Pakistani city of Lahore and Mohammad Faroque from Rawalpindi, left for Akshardham by a taxi from the railway station. Two men who were sent for "moral support," including Ajmeri, reached the temple in a rickshaw, but "as soon as militants began firing, left, mingling into the crowd and escaped," Kaushik said. Kaushik said a letter, written in Persian and found on the slain militants, was written by one of the five arrested on Thursday night. "On preliminary inspection, the handwriting in the letter matches with that of (Abdullah). However, to be absolutely sure we have sent the letter to handwriting experts," Kaushik said. str/pk/sdm India-Gujarat-temple
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