On May 21, 2009, Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving Pakistani gunman from the 26/11 attack, was giving evidence in the court of Justice M.L. Tahaliyani at Mumbai's Arthur Road prison. Suddenly, he dropped a name. The person, he said, who had been their principal guide during the 60-hour operation from a control room in Karachi was Abu Jundal. No one in India had heard this name. Some were puzzled. Prosecution lawyer Ujjwal Nikam believed it was misinformation. And, as so often, the name Abu Jundal disappeared into a file.
Three years later, on June 21, 2012, Saudi Arabia bundled a wanted Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operative, Syed Zabiuddin Ansari, 30, on a plane and sent him to New Delhi. Ansari had more than one alias; among them was Abu Jundal. When Kasab, from his Mumbai cell, heard that Abu Jundal had been deported by the Saudis and was a captive in India, he became, say his jailors, contemplative. The final pieces of a complex puzzle was coming together. Perhaps the most deceptive element in the exhaustive planning that had gone into the barbaric terrorist attack on Mumbai, conceived by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and implemented by LeT, was a poisonous sting in the tail. When the horror that took 166 lives was over, the ISI wanted to leave behind enough false trails to implicate Indians for its most spectacular offensive against India.
