Tunda blows Dawood cover

Affirms that the don still resides in Karachi and is duly guarded by the ISI

Abdul Karim Tunda, who was on the Indian terror radar for two long decades, is singing like a canary. To begin with, he has blown Dawood Ibrahim's Pak cover and told his interrogators that the don still resides in Karachi and is duly guarded by the ISI.

Last week, for the very first time, a senior Pakistani official had admitted to the presence of Dawood, on their soil, but hours later he had downplayed his statement. Pakistan has vehemently denied the presence of Dawood.

Tunda was Dawood's point man who briefed the latter on all LeT operations in India. Dawood, in turn, helped LeT with logistics in Mumbai and other cities.

Interrogators feel that Tunda is a walking encyclopedia of LeT's pan-India operations and a bigger catch than even Abu Jundal, a key 26/11 attack handler.

Seventy-year-old Tunda, a skilful bomb maker with an uncanny ability to spot terror talent, was in constant contact with Jaish-e-Mohammed, Indian Mujahideen and Babbar Khalsa. India's most wanted terrorists -- Hafiz Saeed, Maulana Masood Azhar and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi -were all on first name terms with him.

"He had met the leaders of almost all anti-India terror outfits and even their small operatives,'' a Delhi Police official said.

Though Tunda is spilling the beans, the Delhi Police interrogators are having a hard time separating fact from fiction, and the IB, RAW and NIA sleuths are likely to step into the picture.

Tunda, for instance, has claimed that this is the first time that he has returned

to India after 1998, but this claim needs to be verified. Interrogators also are keen to find out why he was heading to India this time. It is suspected that after Saeed's speech in Pakistan threatening a terror strike in Delhi, Tunda was on his way to plan an attack. Sleuths, however, see the terrorist as a master of deception and fear that some of his disclosures are possibly intended to throw them off the track. Calling the scope of his interrogation a 'vast canvas', the Delhi Police official said that Tunda can bare the terror footprint across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. He had an excellent network of operatives through which he sent men and material into India, the official added. Tunda was running a number of madarsas in Karachi under the auspices of Mehdud-Taleem-Islam-e-Dar-Al-Funoon. Here he would indoctrinate jehadi-minded youth and give them training in use of arms and ammunition. There are around 200 youth of all age groups in every batch, the official said. The penetration level of his network and structure can be gauged by the fact that that in September-October 2010 when Babbar Khalsa International leader Wadhawa Singh wanted to push explosives in India through Bangladesh he contacted Tunda for it. "The explosives which were assembled outside Pakistan were to be sent somewhere in Delhi or Punjab. However, the plan failed as Tunda's operatives were arrested in Bangladesh before they could execute the plan," the official said. Tunda's arrest has come a day after Dawood's trusted aide Iqbal Mirchi died of cardiac arrest in London.