Why was Amar Jawan Jyoti closed to visitors? LET wanted to bomb it

In the days before the new security system was imposed, milling crowds of men, women and children thronged the area around India Gate.

NEWDELHI: Did you know that visitors were earlier allowed to go near the base of the India Gate war memorial? That changed in 2003 when the government learnt that Lashkar-e-taiba (LET) commander Zakiur-rehman Lakhvi, who would go on to mastermind the Mumbai 26/11 attacks just five years later, was going to bomb it.

It was thwarted by a relentless effort from a Delhi police team with some assistance from a civilian who cracked the coded conversations Lakhvi and his associates overnight.

In his latest book “Khaki Files – Inside stories of police investigations”, to be released on October 30, former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar writes that Lakhvi (Hafiz Saeed’s deputy and operations commander of LET), who is in India’s most wanted list, had planned a spectacular attack at India Gate to create an impact like Parliament attack in December 2001.

The 1976 batch IPS officer served in various capacities during his career, including as Delhi Police chief; in the CBI where he was instrumental in cracking on Dawood Ibrahim and headed the special task force which investigated blasts post 1993 bombings. He was also Director General of Tihar prisons. His last book “Dial D for don” was a bestseller.

In 2003, Kumar was posted as joint commissioner Special Cell in Delhi.

In a chapter titled ‘Da Lakhvi Code’, Kumar writes to his colleague at the time, assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Pramod Kushwah (currently DCP in the same unit), during a visit to Kashmir in another terror probe, chanced upon several cryptic emails.

The conversations, which mostly took place in the second and third week of February 2003, were made to appear as if they were love letters in English. The word “Chachaji” — as Lakhvi is called in Lashkar circles — was used repeatedly. The agencies tracked the IP addresses of the mails — it was between computers in different cyber cafes in Delhi with those in Islamabad and Peshwar in Pakistan.

In one of the emails, directions were given in code words —

FORMER DELHI POLICE COMMISSIONER NEERAJ KUMAR IN HIS LATEST BOOK “KHAKI FILES – INSIDE STORIES OF POLICE INVESTIGATIONS”